In a significant legal development for digital intermediaries operating in France, the Paris Judicial Court has dealt a substantial blow to sports broadcaster beIN Sports. The court has rejected a request to impose hefty daily financial penalties on major VPN providers and infrastructure giant Cloudflare after they failed to completely block unauthorized pirate sites streaming Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) matches.
The underlying legal battle dates back to May, when the Paris Judicial Court issued a series of orders instructing several virtual private network (VPN) providers to block ten unauthorized streaming sites and IPTV services. Among the targeted domains were popular pirate platforms such as thetvapp.to and tennistream.com, both of which had been transmitting WTA tennis tour matches without authorization.
These site-blocking orders followed a well-established and increasingly familiar enforcement pattern in France. The initial request was brought forward by beIN Sports, a major network that holds the exclusive French broadcasting rights for the vast majority of WTA tour matches. Demonstrating the aggressive multi-pronged strategy frequently deployed by modern sports rights holders, the broadcaster successfully secured a complementary blocking order against content delivery network and DNS provider Cloudflare just one day after obtaining the initial injunction against the VPNs.
When beIN Sports originally filed its requests with the court, the network asked for severe financial pressure to be applied to ensure compliance. Specifically, the broadcaster demanded penalties of 2,000 euros per day for each domain that two of the targeted VPN providers failed to block. At that initial stage, however, the presiding court exercised caution. It refused to grant the penalty request, noting that there was no evidence demonstrating that the intermediary providers harbored any intent to defy the court order. Furthermore, the court indicated that if technical or practical problems arose during implementation, the participating parties retained the right to return to the judicial system for clarification or further remedy. That is precisely what occurred.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
Seeking to enforce absolute compliance, beIN Sports returned to the Paris Judicial Court, escalating its demands significantly. As first reported by French technology and telecommunications publication L’Informé, the broadcaster complained that the intermediary providers—including Cloudflare and several leading VPN services—had failed to implement comprehensive and effective blocks against all of the targeted domains. Driven by this frustration, beIN requested that the court impose a crushing daily penalty of 10,000 euros for every single domain that remained accessible to internet users in France.
The legal defense for the intermediaries was unified. Cloudflare, alongside major commercial VPN providers Surfshark and NordVPN, retained the same legal counsel to represent their interests in the courtroom. During the hearings, their lawyer pointed to unavoidable technical constraints inherent to their respective network architectures and emphasized that all of the companies had made genuine, good-faith efforts to comply with the spirit and letter of the court’s original injunctions. Another prominent VPN provider, Proton, was also named as a target in the proceedings but ultimately chose not to make an appearance at the hearing.
An examination of the technical implementation revealed that the blocking efforts executed by the companies were indeed far from bulletproof, falling short of the total eradication desired by the broadcaster. Cloudflare successfully blocked three out of the four designated pirate sites, though it achieved this measure strictly through its content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN managed to block six out of eleven targeted domains, but their implementation was similarly restricted, functioning exclusively through the DNS service operating on their physical servers located within French territory.
‘Reasonable Effort’ Standard Upheld
For the Paris Judicial Court, however, these imperfect measures crossed the threshold of legal sufficiency. In a pair of judicial rulings issued on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries are legally obligated to make a reasonable effort to block pirate sites, but they are fundamentally not required to guarantee a flawless or absolute outcome. This interpretation aligns directly with established case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which balances the enforcement of intellectual property rights against the operational realities of digital service providers.
The case files presented to the court demonstrated conclusively that all of the targeted intermediary companies had carried out the court-mandated blocking orders, at least in part, by utilizing the technical tools at their disposal.
"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 reported by L’Informé.
Despite the ongoing dispute over penalties, the original blocking orders themselves remain fully in effect. They will continue to govern the network operators until the conclusion of the current WTA tennis season, which is officially 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 recent judicial outcome mirrors a strikingly similar decision handed down by the same Paris court just last month in a piracy case involving French broadcaster Canal+ and Cloudflare. In that instance, Canal+ petitioned the court for massive daily penalties of 50,000 euros per site against Cloudflare. The court ultimately refused that request as well, determining that Cloudflare was only legally required to take reasonable technical measures—an obligation it fulfilled by restricting access through its CDN.
The controversy surrounding penalty requests is far from over, as other digital infrastructure providers face mounting financial pressures. DNS resolver Quad9 is next in line to face the broadcaster’s aggressive enforcement tactics. According to the Swiss-based foundation that operates Quad9, beIN Sports is demanding 10,000 euros per domain, per day. Given the extensive list of targeted domains, this demand quickly compounds to an astronomical 580,000 euros a day. Quad9’s legal position differs substantially from the VPN providers and Cloudflare, however, because the DNS resolver has not implemented any blocks against the domains in question. A judicial decision regarding beIN’s request against Quad9 is anticipated later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause
The rejection of multi-thousand-euro daily penalties is not the only setback rights holders have encountered in the French courts recently. Alongside defending against penalty requests, the VPN providers have launched direct legal challenges against the underlying blocking orders themselves, and that broader appellate effort has just been granted significant breathing room.
Late last year, major privacy services NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost filed formal appeals against one of the earliest VPN blocking orders ever issued in France. That initial injunction had been obtained in May 2024 by the professional French football league, the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), setting a precedent for sports piracy enforcement.
Acting upon a formal request submitted by the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal elected to put that case on hold on September 30. Rather than pressing forward to render its own verdict on the appeal, the court decided to wait until France’s highest court of ordinary jurisdiction, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court), issues definitive rulings on a series of pending appeals stemming from earlier cases.
These foundational rulings, which were handed down by lower courts in March and May of this year, upheld site-blocking orders that Canal+ had previously secured against various DNS providers. During the legal battles in March, major tech and infrastructure corporations including Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco lost their appeals regarding pirate site DNS blocking. Unwilling to accept the lower court decisions, several of those DNS providers escalated the matter further by carrying their appeals up to the Supreme Court.
While the Paris Court of Appeal acknowledged that the technical and corporate nature of the DNS cases is not entirely identical to the ongoing VPN disputes, it nevertheless determined that there is a substantial degree of legal overlap between the two sets of proceedings. Consequently, the appellate judges concluded that it was prudent to freeze the VPN case and await the ultimate guidance of the Supreme Court.
"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.
These shared legal questions cut to the core of modern digital regulation in Europe. They include fundamental inquiries into who can legally be ordered to assist in halting online piracy, whether France’s aggressive site-blocking legislative framework fully complies with broader European Union law, how copyright infringements must be robustly proven in a digital environment, and under what specific circumstances blocking measures can be deemed legally proportionate.
While a definitive timeline for the Supreme Court’s decisions remains unknown, the Paris Court of Appeal clearly believes that the eventual outcome will carry decisive weight for the future of VPN-based blocking mandates in France.
