Paris — In a significant legal defeat for sports broadcasters seeking aggressive enforcement against online piracy, the Paris Judicial Court has rejected a request by beIN Sports to impose hefty daily financial penalties on major Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers and infrastructure company Cloudflare.
The broadcaster had demanded €10,000 per day for every domain that remained accessible after previous site-blocking orders were issued. However, the court ruled that the intermediaries had demonstrated a "reasonable effort" to comply with the law, establishing a crucial legal precedent that digital service providers are required to attempt compliance rather than guarantee absolute blockage of pirate platforms.
The underlying legal dispute stems back to May, when the Paris Judicial Court ordered several prominent VPN providers to block roughly ten pirate websites and IPTV services that were illegally streaming Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) matches. The blocked destinations included popular streaming hubs such as thetvapp.to and tennistream.com. This judicial order followed a familiar, increasingly utilized enforcement pattern in France, where rights holders target network intermediaries to choke off traffic to unauthorized streams.
The initial action was requested by beIN Sports, which holds the exclusive French broadcasting rights to the vast majority of WTA tour matches. Demonstrating the breadth of their enforcement strategy, the broadcaster secured a nearly identical site-blocking order against Cloudflare just one day after obtaining the initial VPN restrictions.
During the initial proceedings, beIN Sports had asked for penalties of €2,000 per day for each domain that two specific VPN providers failed to block. At that time, the court declined to grant the punitive measures, noting that there was no evidence demonstrating the providers intentionally refused to comply with the judicial directive. The court indicated that if technical or practical problems arose during the implementation phase, the involved parties could return to court to seek clarification or further remedy. That is precisely what occurred, escalating the legal stakes for all parties involved.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
As first reported by the French legal and technology publication L’Informé, beIN Sports returned to the Paris court shortly after the initial orders, complaining that the targeted VPN providers and Cloudflare had failed to completely and effectively block the illicit sports streaming sites. Frustrated by the continued accessibility of the domains, the broadcaster dramatically raised the stakes, requesting a 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 prominent VPN services Surfshark and NordVPN, retained the same legal representation. During the court hearings, their counsel pointed to significant technical constraints inherent to global internet infrastructure and VPN protocols, arguing passionately that their clients had done their absolute best to comply with the spirit and letter of the court’s orders. A fourth VPN provider, Proton, was also formally targeted in the legal action but ultimately chose not to show up at the hearing.
An examination of the actual implementation revealed that the blocking efforts were indeed imperfect and far from bulletproof. Cloudflare successfully blocked three of the four targeted sites, though it did so exclusively through its Content Delivery Network (CDN) layer. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN managed to block six out of eleven domains, restricting access solely through the DNS services operating on their servers physically located within France.
‘Reasonable Effort’ Standard Prevails
For the Paris Judicial Court, the partial implementation measures carried out by the intermediaries were deemed sufficient under the law. In two separate rulings issued on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries are legally bound to make a "reasonable effort" to block infringing sites, but they are fundamentally not required to guarantee a flawless outcome. This interpretation aligns directly with established European Union Court of Justice case law regarding intermediary liability and intellectual property enforcement.
Furthermore, the official case files reviewed by the court clearly demonstrated that all the targeted companies had indeed carried out the blocking orders, at least in part, reflecting a good-faith attempt to adhere to French judicial mandates.
"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 the failed attempt to secure daily penalties, the original site-blocking orders themselves remain fully in effect. They will stay active until the conclusion of the current WTA season, which is scheduled to wrap up on November 14. In the meantime, beIN Sports retains the legal right to appeal the court’s refusal to levy the requested fines.
This latest judicial outcome closely mirrors a similar decision handed down by the same Paris court just last month in a case involving French pay-TV giant Canal+ and Cloudflare. In that proceeding, Canal+ was refused daily penalties of €50,000 per site. The court concluded in that matter that Cloudflare was only obligated to take reasonable measures, which it fulfilled by enacting blocks through its CDN.
The controversy over enforcement metrics and financial penalties is far from over. DNS resolver Quad9 is next in line to face similar legal pressure from beIN Sports. According to the Swiss-based privacy foundation that operates Quad9, the broadcaster is demanding €10,000 per domain, per day, which would astonishingly add up to a staggering €580,000 a day in potential fines.
However, Quad9’s legal and technical position differs significantly from the VPN providers and Cloudflare, as the DNS 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
While rights holders face setbacks regarding financial penalties, the legal battle over the underlying blocking orders is also experiencing significant procedural delays. The VPN providers are actively fighting the blocking orders directly, and that broader legal challenge has just been granted considerable room to breathe.
Late last year, NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost filed formal appeals against one of the very first VPN blocking orders ever issued in France, which was successfully obtained 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 to put that specific case entirely on hold. Rather than rushing to issue a ruling on the merits of the VPN appeal, the appellate court decided to wait until France’s highest court, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court), renders its decisions on pending appeals against seven earlier, highly relevant rulings.
Those foundational rulings, which were issued in March and May of this year, upheld site-blocking orders that Canal+ had previously secured against various DNS providers. In the March cases, tech giants Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco lost their appeals against DNS blocking mandates. Unwilling to let the matter drop, several DNS providers subsequently escalated the dispute to the Supreme Court, seeking ultimate legal clarity on the limits of intermediary liability in France.
While the Paris Court of Appeal formally acknowledged that the VPN dispute and the DNS cases are not entirely identical, it determined that there is a substantial amount of legal overlap to justify freezing the proceedings until the Supreme Court provides its 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 stated in its freeze order.
These critical overlapping legal questions include determining precisely who can be legally ordered to assist in stopping online piracy, whether France’s domestic site-blocking legislation fully complies with overarching European Union law, how copyright infringements must be legally proven by rights holders, and under what exact conditions blocking measures can be deemed proportionate to the harms alleged.
While there is no official timeline for when the French Supreme Court will deliver its long-awaited rulings on the matter, the Paris Court of Appeal clearly believes that the eventual outcome will heavily influence, and potentially dictate, the final resolution of the high-stakes VPN blocking case.
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