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 VPN providers and cloud infrastructure firm Cloudflare.
The decision, issued in two separate rulings on October 7, marks the latest chapter in an escalating legal battle across French courts over who should bear financial responsibility when intermediaries fail to completely block unauthorized streams of live sports events. It also coincides with a parallel decision by the Paris Court of Appeal to freeze a separate VPN challenge until France’s highest court can rule on foundational questions of European and domestic internet blocking law.
Background on the Blocking Orders
The dispute stems from legal actions initiated in May, when the Paris Judicial Court ordered several virtual private network (VPN) providers to implement blocks against ten pirate websites and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services illegally streaming Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tour matches. Among the targeted domains were popular unauthorized streaming platforms such as thetvapp.to and tennistream.com.
The court orders followed a familiar and increasingly utilized enforcement pattern in France. They were requested by beIN Sports, the prominent international sports broadcaster holding the exclusive French television and digital rights to the vast majority of WTA tour matches. Demonstrating the breadth of modern site-blocking strategies, the broadcaster secured a nearly identical blocking order directed at Cloudflare just a day after obtaining the initial injunction against the VPN services.
When beIN Sports first approached the court in May, the broadcaster asked for stringent financial backing, requesting penalties of €2,000 per day for each domain that two specific VPN providers failed to completely block. At the time, the court declined to grant the punitive measures. Judges reasoned that there was no evidence demonstrating the providers harbored any willful intention to flout or evade compliance with the legal order. Instead, the court suggested that if operational problems arose during the implementation phase, the involved parties could return to court to address them. That is precisely what occurred.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
As first reported by the French digital technology and telecommunications publication L’Informé, beIN Sports returned to the Paris Judicial Court complaining that the technical countermeasures deployed by the VPN providers and Cloudflare had fallen short of a complete blockade of the illicit domains. Armed with these grievances, the broadcaster dramatically raised the stakes, requesting a daily penalty of €10,000 for every single domain that remained accessible to internet users.
Legal representation for Cloudflare, Surfshark, and Nordvpn appeared in court under a shared defense strategy, citing complex technical constraints and emphasizing that their respective corporate entities had made a good-faith effort to comply with the judicial mandates within the limits of their system architectures. A fourth targeted provider, Proton, was also named in the proceedings but did not make an appearance at the hearing.
A technical assessment of the blocking measures revealed that they were far from bulletproof. Cloudflare successfully blocked three of the four targeted sites, but accomplished this solely through its Content Delivery Network (CDN) layers. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN blocked six out of eleven domains, restricting access exclusively through the Domain Name System (DNS) configurations operating on their server nodes physically located within France.
‘Reasonable Effort’ Standard Upheld
For the presiding judges, the partial implementation measures were sufficient to satisfy the legal threshold. In the rulings handed down on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries are legally required to make a "reasonable effort" to block infringing sites, but they are under no obligation to guarantee an absolute, flawless outcome. This interpretation aligns closely with established case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Furthermore, the case files verified that every summoned corporation had indeed carried out the court-mandated blocks, at least in part.
"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, according to the translation published by L’Informé.
Despite the setback for the broadcaster, the underlying site-blocking orders remain fully in effect. They will continue to operate until the conclusion of the current WTA season, which is scheduled to wrap up on November 14. In the interim, beIN Sports retains the legal right to appeal the court’s refusal to levy penalties.
This latest outcome closely mirrors another recent decision issued by the Paris court in a separate legal battle initiated by broadcaster Canal+ against Cloudflare just last month. In that case, Canal+ petitioned the court for staggering daily penalties of €50,000 per site, which the judiciary similarly rejected. The court reaffirmed that Cloudflare’s obligation was strictly limited to taking reasonable mitigation steps, which it had fulfilled by executing blocks through its CDN infrastructure.
The legal pressure shows no sign of abating, however. DNS resolver Quad9 stands next in line to face the broadcaster’s wrath. According to statements from the Swiss-based non-profit privacy foundation, beIN Sports is demanding a penalty of €10,000 per domain, per day, which would accumulate to an astonishing €580,000 per day across the targeted domains.
Quad9’s legal posture differs fundamentally from the VPN providers and Cloudflare, as the recursive DNS provider has declined to implement blocks against any of the disputed domains. A judicial decision regarding the broadcaster’s request against Quad9 is anticipated later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause on VPN Disputes
The refusal of the Paris court to issue daily penalties is not the only obstacle rightsholders have encountered in their aggressive campaign against digital piracy. The VPN providers themselves are aggressively fighting the core blocking orders through the appellate courts, and that legal resistance has just been granted significant breathing room.
Last year, major privacy firms including NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost filed formal appeals against one of the earliest VPN site-blocking orders issued in France. That specific order had been obtained in May 2024 by the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), the governing body of French professional football, targeting platforms broadcasting matches without authorization.
Acting upon formal requests submitted by the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal elected to place the pending case on legal hold on September 30. Rather than rendering a judgment on the merits of the VPN appeal, the appellate court decided to pause proceedings until France’s highest court of ordinary jurisdiction, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court), issues definitive rulings on pending appeals tied to seven earlier judicial decisions.
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 infrastructure DNS providers. During the March proceedings, technology giants Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco suffered defeat when the court rejected their challenges against DNS-level blocking orders. Consequently, several major DNS providers escalated the dispute to the Supreme Court to test the legality of the measures under French and European law.
Although the Paris Court of Appeal acknowledged that the technical and corporate nature of the cases is not identical—noting that the seven pending Supreme Court cases involve DNS resolvers rather than VPN providers, and were initiated by Canal+ rather than football authorities LFP and LFP1—the bench determined that there is a substantial overlap in core legal questions.
"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 official French ruling.
The overlapping legal questions slated for Supreme Court review include determining precisely which categories of digital intermediaries can be legally ordered to assist in halting online piracy, whether France’s aggressive site-blocking legislative framework is fully compliant with overarching European Union law, the evidentiary standards required to legally prove online copyright infringements, and the legal tests governing when blocking measures satisfy the principle of proportionality.
While no timeline has been established for when the Supreme Court will deliver its definitive judgments, the Paris Court of Appeal remains convinced that the eventual outcome will carry profound implications for the ongoing legal viability of the VPN blocking cases.
A complete copy of the Paris Court of Appeal’s freeze ruling, registered under docket number RG 25/09229, has been made publicly available as part of the judicial record.
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