PARIS — In a significant legal defeat for sports broadcasters seeking aggressive enforcement against online piracy, the Paris Judicial Court has rejected a bid by beIN Sports to impose heavy daily financial penalties on major VPN providers and cloud infrastructure giant Cloudflare.
The decision, handed down in two separate rulings on October 7, centers on whether intermediaries can be forced to pay punishing fines when their efforts to block unauthorized streaming sites fail to achieve absolute perfection. Finding that the companies had made reasonable efforts to comply with previous court orders, the French court concluded that demanding extreme financial penalties would strike an unfair balance between intellectual property enforcement and the freedom to conduct a legitimate business.
The latest chapter in France’s ongoing battle against sports piracy stems from a legal action initiated in May, when the Paris Judicial Court ordered several virtual private network (VPN) providers to block ten pirate websites and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services illegally streaming Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) matches. The targeted domains included popular streaming hubs such as thetvapp.to and tennistream.com.
The blocking order followed a familiar enforcement pattern utilized by major rights holders in France. It was requested by beIN Sports, which holds the exclusive French broadcasting rights to the vast majority of WTA tour matches. Just a day after securing the initial injunction against the VPN providers, the broadcaster obtained a similar blocking mandate targeting Cloudflare.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
In its original spring request, beIN Sports asked the court to impose penalties of 2,000 euros per day for each domain that two of the targeted VPN providers failed to block. At the time, the court declined to issue the fines, noting there was no evidence that the providers intended to defy the order. The court suggested that if technical problems or compliance gaps arose, the parties could return to court to seek clarification. That is precisely what happened.
As first reported by French legal and technology publication L’Informé, beIN Sports returned to the Paris court complaining that the VPN providers and Cloudflare had not fully blocked the unauthorized domains. Frustrated by persistent access, the broadcaster drastically escalated its demands, requesting a daily penalty of 10,000 euros for every single domain that remained accessible through the intermediaries’ services.
During the subsequent hearing, Cloudflare, Surfshark, and NordVPN were all represented by the same legal counsel. They defended their compliance efforts by citing technical constraints inherent to their network infrastructures, emphasizing that they had done their absolute best to implement the court-mandated blocks. A fourth company, Proton, was also targeted in the proceedings but 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. Cloudflare successfully blocked three of the four targeted sites, but accomplished this exclusively through its Content Delivery Network (CDN) layer. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN blocked six of the eleven designated domains, achieving this strictly through the Domain Name System (DNS) service operating on their physical servers located within France.
‘Reasonable Effort’ Standard Prevails
For the Paris court, the imperfect execution of the blocking orders was legally sufficient. In its rulings issued on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries are legally required to make a reasonable effort to block pirate sites, but they are not held to an obligation of absolute outcome. This interpretation aligns squarely with established case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Furthermore, the official case files demonstrated that all of the targeted companies had carried out the court’s orders, at least in part.
Quoting the court’s written decision, L’Informé reported that the judges found the heavy financial penalties unwarranted.
"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.
Despite the rebuff over daily fines, the original site-blocking orders themselves remain fully in legal effect until the conclusion of the WTA tennis season, which is scheduled to wrap up on November 14. Meanwhile, beIN Sports retains the right to appeal the court’s rejection of its penalty requests.
The outcome strongly mirrors a similar decision handed down by the Paris court just a month prior, arising from a case brought by rival broadcaster Canal+ against Cloudflare. In that dispute, Canal+ requested staggering daily penalties of 50,000 euros per site. The court similarly refused the request, concluding that Cloudflare was only obligated to take reasonable measures, which it had fulfilled by blocking access through its CDN.
Public DNS resolver Quad9 stands next in line to face similar legal pressure from sports broadcasters. According to the Swiss-based nonprofit foundation, beIN Sports is demanding 10,000 euros per domain, per day, which would accumulate to an astonishing total of 580,000 euros a day. Quad9’s legal position differs fundamentally from the other intermediaries, however, as the non-logging resolver is not blocking any of the disputed domains at all. A judicial decision regarding beIN’s request against Quad9 is expected later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause on VPN Dispute
The refusal to award daily penalties is not the only recent setback for French sports rightsholders. The VPN providers are actively fighting the underlying site-blocking orders themselves, and that broader legal battle has just been granted significant breathing room.
Last year, major VPN providers including NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost filed formal appeals against one of the earliest VPN blocking orders, which had been secured by the French professional football league, the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), back in May 2025.
At the specific request of the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal issued an order on September 30 putting that active case on hold. Instead of rendering a decision on the merits of the VPN appeal, the appellate court decided to wait for France’s highest ordinary court, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court), to rule on pending appeals against seven earlier judicial rulings.
Those foundational rulings, which were issued in March and May of this year, upheld site-blocking orders that Canal+ had previously obtained against major DNS providers. During the March proceedings, technology giants Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco lost their appeals challenging the scope of the mandates. Several DNS providers subsequently escalated the matter to the Supreme Court to contest the legality of forcing infrastructure providers to police internet traffic.
While the Paris Court of Appeal acknowledged that the technical disputes are not entirely identical—noting that the seven cases under Supreme Court review involve DNS resolvers rather than VPNs, and were initiated by Canal+ rather than the LFP—it determined there is substantial legal overlap to justify freezing the proceedings.
"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 noted in its freeze order.
The shared legal questions encompass fundamental issues of European internet law, including precisely who can be legally ordered to assist in stopping digital piracy, whether France’s domestic site-blocking legislation complies with broader EU law, how copyright infringements must be robustly proven in court, and under what exact conditions blocking measures can be deemed legally proportionate.
While it remains unclear precisely when France’s Supreme Court will issue its definitive rulings on the matter, the Paris Court of Appeal believes the eventual outcome will carry profound implications for the ongoing VPN dispute.
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