In a significant legal development for internet intermediaries and digital privacy advocates in Europe, the Paris Judicial Court has dealt a sharp blow to sports broadcaster beIN Sports. The court has formally rejected a request to impose steep daily financial penalties on major Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers and cloud infrastructure giant Cloudflare for failing to achieve complete, foolproof blocking of pirate sports streaming websites.
The dispute stems back to May, when the Paris Judicial Court issued an order compelling several VPN providers and network intermediaries to block roughly ten unauthorized streaming sites and IPTV services. These platforms had been illegally broadcasting Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tour matches to audiences in France. Among the targeted domains were popular illicit streaming portals such as thetvapp.to and tennistream.com.
The legal action followed a familiar and increasingly utilized pattern in the French digital landscape. The injunction was aggressively pursued by beIN Sports, a major media network that holds the exclusive French broadcasting rights for the vast majority of WTA tour matches. In an effort to choke off traffic to the unauthorized streams, the broadcaster secured a parallel site-blocking order directed at Cloudflare just a day after obtaining the initial injunction against the VPN services.
During the initial stages of the legal battle, beIN Sports attempted to secure immediate leverage by asking the court to impose penalties of €2,000 per day for each domain that two specific VPN providers failed to block successfully. At the time, the court declined to grant the penalty request. Judges reasoned that there was no substantive evidence to show that the intermediary companies harbored any intentional malice or a willful refusal to comply with the court’s mandates. Furthermore, the court noted that if technical or operational problems arose during the implementation phase, the involved parties always had the recourse to return to court to seek clarification or enforcement.
That is precisely what transpired, setting the stage for a much larger legal showdown over the scope and limits of site-blocking obligations.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
According to initial reports from French tech and telecommunications publication L’Informé, beIN Sports returned to the Paris Judicial Court shortly after the initial orders, complaining bitterly that the targeted VPN providers and Cloudflare had not adequately or completely blocked access to the infringing domains. Furious with the continued accessibility of the pirated WTA streams, the broadcaster dramatically escalated its financial demands, requesting a staggering daily penalty of €10,000 for every single domain that remained accessible to internet users in France.
The legal defense for the intermediaries was unified. Cloudflare, along with major privacy-focused VPN services Surfshark and NordVPN, retained the same legal counsel to fight the penalty demands. During the hearings, their legal representatives pointed to significant technical constraints inherent in modern internet routing and VPN architecture, emphasizing that the companies had done their absolute best to comply with the spirit and letter of the court’s original instructions. A fourth intermediary, Proton, was also officially targeted in the proceedings but ultimately did not make an appearance at the hearing.
An examination of the technical measures implemented by the companies revealed that the blocking efforts were indeed not bulletproof or absolute. Cloudflare successfully blocked three out of the four targeted sites, but it managed this restriction strictly through its Content Delivery Network (CDN) layer rather than a total network ban. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN implemented blocks on six out of the eleven designated domains, executing these restrictions exclusively through the DNS service operating on their physical servers located within France.
‘Reasonable Effort’ Standard Prevails
For the Paris Judicial Court, however, these partial and pragmatic measures were deemed entirely sufficient under the law. In two separate rulings officially issued on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries are legally obligated to make a "reasonable effort" to block infringing sites, but they are under no legal obligation to guarantee a flawless outcome. This vital legal distinction aligns squarely with established case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which has long recognized the operational limitations faced by technical intermediaries.
The underlying court files thoroughly demonstrated that all the summoned companies had genuinely carried out the blocking orders, at least in a partial capacity, thereby undermining beIN Sports’ claims of deliberate non-compliance.
"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," the court wrote in its decision, as translated and quoted by L’Informé.
Despite this setback for the broadcaster, the original site-blocking orders themselves remain fully in effect and will continue to operate until the conclusion of the WTA tennis season, which is currently scheduled to wrap up on November 14. In the meantime, beIN Sports retains the legal right to appeal the court’s rejection of its penalty demands.
This outcome closely mirrors a remarkably similar ruling handed down by the same Paris court in a case involving French media heavyweight Canal+ and Cloudflare just a month prior. In that dispute, Canal+ petitioned the court for heavy daily penalties of €50,000 per site against Cloudflare. The court similarly rejected the demand, concluding that Cloudflare was only required to take reasonable measures to curb piracy, a threshold it had successfully met by applying restrictions through its CDN infrastructure.
The legal battlefield in France is far from settled, with other key infrastructure players facing similar pressures. DNS resolver Quad9 is next in line to face the broadcaster’s aggressive legal tactics. According to disclosures from the Swiss-based privacy foundation, beIN Sports is demanding a crippling €10,000 per domain, per day, which would mathematically add up to an astronomical €580,000 per day.
Quad9’s legal position differs significantly from the VPN providers, however, as the DNS resolver has not implemented any blocks against the disputed domains whatsoever. A definitive judicial decision regarding beIN Sports’ penalty request against Quad9 is anticipated to be released later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause
The rejection of the daily financial penalties represents only the latest in a string of frustrations for intellectual property rightsholders attempting to force technical intermediaries into policing the internet. Beyond defending against penalty requests, the VPN providers are mounting a broader counter-offensive, actively fighting the underlying site-blocking orders themselves. That legal crusade recently received significant breathing room.
Last year, prominent VPN providers NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost formally appealed one of the pioneering VPN site-blocking orders secured by the professional French football league, the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), back in May 2025.
At the specific urging of the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal elected to put that high-stakes case on hold on September 30. Rather than pressing forward with an immediate ruling on the merits of the VPN appeal, the appellate court decided to hit the pause button and wait for France’s highest court, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court), to issue definitive rulings on a series of pending appeals stemming from earlier, closely related cases.
Those foundational rulings, which were handed down in March and May of this year, upheld site-blocking orders that Canal+ had previously secured against major DNS providers. During the initial March proceedings, tech giants Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco suffered a defeat when they lost their legal appeals against mandatory DNS blocking. Unwilling to let the precedent stand, several DNS providers escalated the matter further, taking their fight directly to the Supreme Court.
While the Paris Court of Appeal explicitly acknowledged that the ongoing DNS disputes are not identical to the modern VPN-specific litigation, the bench concluded that there is a substantial degree of legal overlap. Consequently, the judges determined it was wise and prudent to freeze the VPN case and await the Supreme Court’s definitive guidance.
"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 wrote in its official stay order.
These complex, overlapping legal questions cut to the very core of modern digital regulation in Europe. They include determining precisely which entities can legally be ordered to assist in stopping online piracy, examining whether France’s aggressive site-blocking legislative framework fully complies with broader European Union law, establishing how copyright infringements must be robustly proven in a court of law, and defining the exact parameters of when blocking measures can be considered legally proportionate.
While it remains entirely uncertain when the French Supreme Court will ultimately issue its rulings on these pivotal questions, the Paris Court of Appeal is clearly betting that the eventual outcome will carry profound implications for the future of the VPN site-blocking case, setting a definitive legal baseline for how far rightsholders can push technical intermediaries in the digital age.
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