PARIS — In a notable legal setback for major sports broadcasters seeking to crack down on digital piracy, the Paris Judicial Court has firmly rejected a request from beIN Sports to impose hefty daily financial penalties against several virtual private network (VPN) providers and infrastructure giant Cloudflare. The broadcaster had accused the tech intermediaries of failing to properly execute site-blocking orders targeting unauthorized platforms streaming Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) matches.
The decision arrives amidst an escalating legal battle across France over the scope, feasibility, and proportionality of website-blocking mandates. While copyright holders continue to push for aggressive enforcement mechanisms to protect exclusive broadcasting rights, intermediary tech firms argue that technological constraints make absolute compliance nearly impossible without severely impacting broader internet infrastructure and user rights.
The Origin of the Conflict
The legal saga dates back to May, when the Paris Judicial Court ordered several prominent VPN providers and technical intermediaries to block a total of ten pirate websites and IPTV services. These illicit platforms had been illegally streaming WTA tennis matches to French audiences, undermining the exclusive broadcast rights held by beIN Sports in the country. Among the targeted domains were popular streaming hubs such as thetvapp.to and tennistream.com.
The court order followed a familiar enforcement pattern increasingly utilized by sports rights holders in France. Upon securing the initial mandate, beIN Sports moved swiftly to ensure compliance, requesting similar orders against core internet infrastructure providers like Cloudflare.
During the initial proceedings, beIN Sports had asked the court to impose steep financial penalties of 2,000 euros per day for each domain that two specific VPN providers failed to block. At the time, the court declined to impose the penalties, noting that there was no evidence demonstrating an intentional refusal to comply by the providers. Instead, the court left the door open for the parties to return to judicial review if practical difficulties arose during implementation. True to that expectation, difficulties did arise, and the broadcaster returned to court demanding a much heavier hand.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
As first reported by the French legal and technology publication L’Informé, beIN Sports re-approached the Paris court complaining that the targeted intermediaries had fallen short of a complete block. This time, the broadcaster escalated its demands, requesting a staggering daily penalty of 10,000 euros for every single domain that remained accessible to French users despite the previous orders.
The response from the tech sector was swift and unified. Cloudflare, along with prominent VPN services Surfshark and Nordvpn, appeared in court represented by the same legal counsel. They highlighted significant technical constraints inherent to internet architecture and argued they had made sincere, reasonable efforts to comply with the court’s directives within the boundaries of their operational capabilities. Proton, another major VPN provider also targeted in the action, chose not to appear at the hearing.
An examination of the technical implementation revealed that the blocking efforts were indeed imperfect. Cloudflare successfully blocked three of the four targeted sites, but achieved this strictly through its content delivery network (CDN) layer. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN successfully blocked six out of eleven domains, limiting their restrictions strictly to the DNS services operating on their servers physically located within France.
‘Reasonable Effort’ Over Guaranteed Outcomes
For the Paris Judicial Court, these partial measures crossed the threshold of legal sufficiency. In a pair of rulings issued on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries are legally required to make a reasonable effort to block designated pirate sites, but they are not obligated to guarantee a flawless outcome. This interpretation aligns closely with established case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which balances intellectual property enforcement against the fundamental freedoms of commercial operators.
The court files demonstrated that all responding companies had indeed implemented the blocking orders, at least in part, validating their claims of good faith implementation.
"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.
The original blocking orders themselves remain legally binding and active through the conclusion of the current WTA season, which is scheduled to wrap up on November 14. In the interim, beIN Sports retains the right to appeal the court’s rejection of its penalty requests.
This outcome mirrors a strikingly similar ruling handed down by the same Paris court just last month in a case involving French pay-TV giant Canal+ and Cloudflare. In that proceeding, the court similarly refused a request by Canal+ for daily penalties of 50,000 euros per site. The court reasoned that Cloudflare was only obligated to take reasonable measures, a standard the company met by executing blocks through its CDN.
The legal pressure, however, shows no sign of abating. Public DNS resolver Quad9 is next in line to face judicial scrutiny in France. According to the Swiss-based non-profit foundation, beIN Sports is seeking penalties of 10,000 euros per domain, per day, which could potentially accumulate to a staggering 580,000 euros per day. Quad9’s legal position differs fundamentally from the other intermediaries, as the organization maintains that it has not implemented any blocks on the disputed domains. A definitive judicial decision regarding the request against Quad9 is anticipated later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause on Broader VPN Dispute
The recent denial of financial penalties represents only one facet of a broader multi-front judicial retreat for rightsholders seeking to rope technical intermediaries into anti-piracy enforcement. Beyond defending against penalty motions, the VPN providers are actively fighting the underlying site-blocking orders themselves, and that legal resistance has just been granted crucial breathing room.
Last year, a coalition of major VPN providers—including NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost—formally appealed one of the pioneering VPN blocking orders obtained in May 2025 by the French professional football league, the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP).
Acceding to a request formally submitted by the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal elected on September 30 to stay the proceedings, putting the active case on hold. Instead of rendering a verdict on the merits of the VPN appeal, the appellate court decided to wait until France’s highest ordinary court, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court), issues definitive rulings on a series of pending appeals stemming from earlier, closely related DNS-blocking disputes.
These foundational rulings, handed down in March and May of this year, upheld site-blocking orders originally obtained by Canal+ against major DNS resolution providers. During the March proceedings, global technology leaders including Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco suffered defeat in their appeals. Unwilling to let the precedent stand, several DNS providers escalated the dispute to the Supreme Court.
While the Paris Court of Appeal acknowledged that the technical and corporate distinctions between DNS resolvers and VPN providers are significant—and noted that the underlying litigation was initiated by Canal+ rather than the football authorities—it ultimately determined that the two sets of cases share deeply intertwined 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 appellate court noted in its ruling.
These shared systemic questions include determining precisely which categories of digital intermediaries can legally be compelled to assist in anti-piracy efforts, assessing whether France’s aggressive site-blocking legislative framework fully complies with overarching European Union law, establishing standardized evidentiary requirements for proving copyright infringements, and defining the precise legal parameters for when blocking measures can be deemed truly proportionate.
Although no firm timeline has been established for the Supreme Court to hand down its rulings, the Paris Court of Appeal signaled that the ultimate outcome will carry decisive weight for the future liability and obligations of VPN providers operating within the French jurisdiction.
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