The legal battle over online sports piracy in France has reached a significant milestone after the Paris Judicial Court dealt a heavy blow to major sports broadcaster beIN Sports. In a pair of rulings issued on October 7, the court formally rejected requests to impose heavy daily financial penalties against prominent Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers and cloud infrastructure giant Cloudflare. The broadcaster had sought severe financial sanctions, alleging that these tech intermediaries failed to sufficiently block unauthorized pirate websites and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) streams broadcasting Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) matches.
The underlying dispute traces back to May, when the Paris Judicial Court ordered several VPN providers and network intermediaries to block ten notorious pirate websites and IPTV services dedicated to streaming WTA tennis matches. Among the targeted domains were popular unauthorized platforms such as thetvapp.to and tennistream.com. This judicial mandate followed a heavily established, familiar pattern of site-blocking requests routinely deployed by rightsholders in France. The initial legal action was brought forward by beIN Sports, which maintains the exclusive broadcasting rights for the majority of WTA tour matches within the French market. Demonstrating the aggressive multi-front strategy typical of modern sports anti-piracy campaigns, the broadcaster successfully secured a strikingly similar site-blocking order directed at Cloudflare just one day after obtaining the initial injunction.
During the initial phase of the litigation, beIN Sports attempted to secure severe teeth for its injunctions by asking for financial penalties amounting to 2,000 euros per day for each domain that two specific VPN providers failed to block completely. At that time, however, the presiding court firmly refused to grant the request. The judiciary reasoned that there was no substantive evidence showing that the targeted intermediary companies harbored any deliberate intent to bypass or defy the court-ordered compliance measures. Furthermore, the court indicated that if genuine logistical or technical problems arose during the implementation phase, the involved parties always retained the legal avenue of returning to court to seek clarification or modifications.
True to that judicial expectation, that is precisely what happened as the dispute escalated.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
According to initial reporting by French technology publication L’Informé, representatives for beIN Sports returned to the Paris Judicial Court to voice vehement complaints that the targeted VPN providers and Cloudflare had not adequately or fully blocked the designated pirate domains. Emboldened by their frustration over the persistent accessibility of the streams, the broadcaster dramatically raised the stakes. This time around, beIN requested an exorbitant daily financial penalty of 10,000 euros for every individual domain that remained accessible to French internet users despite the judicial blocking orders.
During the subsequent hearing, Cloudflare, alongside major commercial VPN operators Surfshark and Nordvpn, mounted a coordinated defense. Notably, all three technology entities were represented by the same legal counsel. In their defense, the companies pointed directly to complex technical constraints inherent to their network architectures and insisted they had executed their operational duties to the absolute best of their ability to comply with the court’s directives. A fourth prominent VPN service, Proton, was also named as a target in the proceedings but ultimately failed to make an appearance at the scheduled hearing.
An examination of the technical realities surrounding the compliance efforts revealed that the site-blocking measures were indeed not entirely bulletproof or comprehensive. Cloudflare successfully managed to block three out of the four targeted pirate sites, though it did so strictly through its Content Delivery Network (CDN) layer. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN successfully blocked six out of the eleven designated domains, and even then, those restrictions were applied exclusively through the Domain Name System (DNS) services operating on their server infrastructure physically located within France.
‘Reasonable Effort’
In the eyes of the presiding French magistrates, the partial implementation of these access restrictions was deemed sufficient under the law. In the two distinct rulings issued on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries and technical service providers are legally obligated to make a reasonable and good-faith effort to block designated pirate sites. However, the court explicitly clarified that these intermediaries are not held to an absolute obligation of result, meaning they do not have to guarantee a foolproof outcome. This legal interpretation aligns closely with established case law handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Furthermore, the official case files demonstrated conclusively that all the defendant companies had carried out the tribunal’s initial orders, at least in part.
As quoted and translated by L’Informé, the court detailed its reasoning in the official written decision: "The requested penalty (…) therefore does not appear necessary or proportionate, given the need to strike a fair balance between the protection of the intellectual property rights of copyright and neighboring rights holders, and the freedom to conduct a business enjoyed by economic operators."
Despite the setback for the broadcaster, the original site-blocking orders themselves remain legally active and in full effect. They are scheduled to remain operational until the conclusion of the current WTA tennis season, which is formally set to wrap up on November 14. In the interim, beIN Sports retains the legal right to challenge the court’s refusal to impose penalties through the appellate system.
This latest judicial outcome closely mirrors a similar decision handed down by the very same Paris court just a month prior, arising from a separate anti-piracy lawsuit initiated by French media giant Canal+ against Cloudflare. In that instance, Canal+ was similarly refused its request for massive daily penalties totaling 50,000 euros per site. The court similarly concluded that Cloudflare’s legal duty was satisfied simply by taking reasonable measures, which the company fulfilled by implementing blocks through its CDN infrastructure.
The legal pressure from sports leagues and broadcasters shows no sign of slowing down, with alternative DNS resolver Quad9 positioned directly next in line for similar litigation. According to information released by the Swiss privacy foundation that operates Quad9, beIN Sports is seeking a staggering 10,000 euros per domain, per day, from the resolver. Given the scale of the blocked domains, that figure would rapidly compound to an astronomical 580,000 euros a day. However, Quad9’s operational and legal position differs markedly from the VPN providers, as the non-profit DNS resolver is not currently blocking any of the targeted domains at all. A judicial decision regarding beIN’s extraordinary financial request against Quad9 is anticipated to be delivered later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause
The successive rejections of punitive financial penalties are not the only significant roadblocks encountered by rightsholders in the French court system. Alongside the penalty disputes, the VPN providers are actively mounting direct challenges against the legality of the underlying site-blocking orders themselves, and that broader appellate effort has just been granted considerable breathing room.
Late last year, major privacy-focused VPN providers including NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost filed formal appeals against one of the earliest landmark VPN blocking orders. That initial directive had been successfully secured in May 2025 by the Professional Football League in France, commonly known as the LFP, targeting unauthorized broadcasts of French football matches.
Acting upon a formal request submitted by the legal teams representing the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal elected to put that contentious case entirely on hold on September 30. Rather than pushing forward to a definitive ruling on the merits of the VPN appeal, the appellate court decided to bide its time and wait for a definitive pronouncement from France’s highest court of ordinary jurisdiction, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court). The Supreme Court is currently reviewing a series of pending appeals directed against seven earlier judicial rulings.
These pivotal baseline rulings, which were handed down in March and May of this year, upheld a series of site-blocking orders originally obtained by Canal+ against major DNS service providers. During the initial legal battles in March, tech giants Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco suffered a decisive defeat when they lost their appeals against DNS blocking mandates. In response to that unfavorable outcome, several prominent DNS providers escalated the dispute by taking the matter upward to the French Supreme Court, seeking clarity on the legality and scope of such administrative network interference.
While the Paris Court of Appeal formally acknowledged that the technical and corporate nature of the DNS cases is not entirely identical to the ongoing VPN disputes, it nevertheless determined that there is a substantial amount of legal overlap to justify freezing the current proceedings. The appellate judges concluded that awaiting the higher court’s verdict is essential to maintaining judicial consistency across similar technological domains.
"Despite the differences, namely that the seven decisions under appeal concern DNS providers rather than VPNs, and that they were issued at the request of the Canal Plus companies rather than LFP and LFP1, the present case has many legal questions in common with the rulings under appeal before the [Supreme Court]," the appeals court stated in its translated written decision.
The complex web of overlapping legal questions shared across these distinct cases includes critical inquiries into precisely which categories of digital intermediaries can be legally ordered to assist in halting digital piracy, whether France’s aggressive site-blocking legislative framework fully complies with broader European Union law, how copyright infringements must be robustly proven in a court of law, and under what specific circumstances web-blocking measures can be considered legally proportionate.
While a definitive timeline for the French Supreme Court to issue its rulings remains entirely unknown, the Paris Court of Appeal remains convinced that the ultimate outcome will carry profound implications for the ongoing legal viability of the VPN site-blocking cases.
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