In a significant legal development for digital intermediaries, the Paris Judicial Court has rejected a bid by broadcaster beIN Sports to impose hefty daily financial penalties on major VPN providers and infrastructure giant Cloudflare. The broadcaster had sought to penalize the companies for allegedly failing to fully block unauthorized streaming sites broadcasting Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) matches.
The underlying dispute traces back to May, when the Paris Judicial Court ordered several virtual private network (VPN) providers and intermediaries to block a targeted list of ten pirate websites and IPTV services. Among the platforms slated for blocking were notable streaming destinations such as thetvapp.to and tennistream.com, which were illegally distributing WTA tour content.
This judicial order followed a well-established pattern of site-blocking litigation in France. The request was formally brought forward by beIN Sports, which holds the exclusive broadcasting rights for the majority of WTA tour matches within the French territory. In a parallel legal maneuver just a day after securing the VPN injunction, the broadcaster successfully obtained a similar site-blocking order directed at Cloudflare, seeking to choke off unauthorized access at the network infrastructure level.
During the initial court proceedings, beIN Sports had requested punitive measures amounting to €2,000 per day for each domain name that specific VPN providers failed to block successfully. At the time, the court declined to impose those fines, noting that there was no evidentiary basis to suggest the providers acted with deliberate intent to bypass or defy judicial compliance. The court indicated at the time that if practical issues or enforcement gaps arose, the litigants could return to court to seek further relief. That is precisely the course of action beIN Sports ultimately pursued.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
As first revealed by French tech and telecommunications publication L’Informé, the broadcaster returned to the Paris Judicial Court to argue that the intermediaries—specifically Cloudflare and several leading VPN services—had failed to implement comprehensive and effective blocks against the designated pirate domains. Frustrated by the continued accessibility of the streams, beIN Sports dramatically escalated its demands, requesting a staggering daily penalty of €10,000 for every single domain that remained reachable by users in France.
During the subsequent hearing, Cloudflare, Surfshark, and NordVPN mounted a coordinated defense. Represented by the same legal counsel, the companies pointed to inherent technical constraints and argued that they had acted in good faith, deploying reasonable measures to comply with the court’s original mandates. Proton, another privacy service targeted in the legal action, was also named in the proceedings but did not make an appearance at the hearing.
An examination of the technical execution revealed that the blocking efforts were indeed imperfect and fell short of total containment. Cloudflare managed to block three out of the four targeted sites, but its enforcement was strictly limited to its Content Delivery Network (CDN) level. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN successfully blocked six of the eleven targeted domains, though their enforcement was restricted exclusively to the DNS services operating on their server infrastructure physically located within France.
‘Reasonable Effort’ Standard Prevails
For the Paris court, however, these partial implementation measures crossed the threshold of legal sufficiency. In a pair of formal rulings issued on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries and privacy services are legally required to make a reasonable, good-faith effort to block designated pirate websites. Crucially, the court affirmed that these technical intermediaries are not legally obligated to guarantee a flawless outcome, a standard that aligns cleanly with established case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union.
The case files presented to the bench demonstrated that all the targeted companies had indeed carried out the court’s instructions, at least to a partial degree, making absolute financial penalties unwarranted under the circumstances.
"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, as translated and quoted by L’Informé.
Despite the rejection of the penalty requests, the original site-blocking orders remain fully in effect, holding authority until the conclusion of the current WTA tennis season, which is scheduled to wrap up on November 14. In the interim, beIN Sports retains the legal right to appeal the court’s decision.
This latest judicial outcome closely mirrors a similar ruling delivered by the Paris court last month in a separate piracy dispute between French broadcaster Canal+ and Cloudflare. In that instance, Canal+ petitioned the court for aggressive daily penalties of €50,000 per site, citing insufficient compliance. The court similarly rejected the demand, concluding that Cloudflare was only obligated to exercise reasonable measures, which it had fulfilled by implementing restrictions via its CDN.
The legal pressure from sports rights holders shows no sign of slowing down, with DNS resolver Quad9 positioned next in line for potential financial penalties. According to the Swiss non-profit privacy foundation operating Quad9, beIN Sports is seeking a penalty of €10,000 per domain, per day, which would cumulatively reach an astonishing €580,000 daily. Quad9’s legal posture differs fundamentally from the VPN providers, as the DNS resolver has not implemented any blocks against the disputed domains. A formal judicial decision regarding beIN’s request against Quad9 is anticipated later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause
The setback regarding financial penalties is not the only obstacle rights holders are facing in French courts. Simultaneously, the VPN providers are aggressively challenging the core site-blocking orders themselves, and that ongoing legal battle has recently secured significant breathing room.
Late last year, prominent VPN services NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost formally appealed one of the pioneering VPN site-blocking orders, which had been secured in May 2025 by the professional French football league, the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP).
Acting upon a formal application submitted by the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal issued an order on September 30 to temporarily freeze proceedings on the matter. Rather than issuing a direct ruling on the merits of the VPN appeal, the appellate court decided to await a crucial precedent-setting judgment from France’s highest court of ordinary jurisdiction, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court).
The Supreme Court is currently reviewing appeals filed against seven earlier judicial rulings issued in March and May of this year. Those earlier decisions upheld sweeping site-blocking orders that Canal+ had successfully obtained against major DNS infrastructure providers. In the March cases, global tech and networking giants Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco suffered defeat when the court rejected their appeals regarding DNS-level blocking mandates. Following that defeat, several DNS providers escalated the dispute to the Supreme Court to test the legal boundaries of intermediary liability.
While the Paris Court of Appeal acknowledged that the technical and corporate details of the DNS cases are not entirely identical to the ongoing VPN dispute, it determined there is substantial legal overlap to justify staying the VPN proceedings until the Supreme Court provides clarity.
"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 appellate court stated in its official ruling.
These central, unresolved legal questions include defining precisely which entities can be legally compelled to assist in anti-piracy enforcement, assessing whether France’s aggressive site-blocking legislative framework remains fully compliant with overarching European Union law, establishing appropriate evidentiary standards for proving copyright infringements, and determining the exact parameters under which blocking measures can be deemed legally proportionate.
While a definitive timeline for the Supreme Court’s ruling remains unavailable, the Paris Court of Appeal remains convinced that the eventual outcome will carry profound implications for the legal standing of VPN providers facing mandatory site-blocking obligations in France.
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