The legal battle over online piracy enforcement in France has delivered a notable setback to major sports broadcasters, as the Paris Judicial Court has firmly rejected demands for hefty daily financial penalties against leading virtual private network (VPN) providers and cloud infrastructure giant Cloudflare.
The underlying dispute traces back to May, when the Paris Judicial Court ordered several prominent VPN providers to block a total of ten unauthorized streaming sites and IPTV services that were broadcasting Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tour matches. Among the targeted domains specified in the court order were popular unauthorized streaming platforms such as thetvapp.to and tennistream.com.
This initial legal maneuver followed a familiar, established pattern within the French digital landscape. The dynamic blocking orders were requested by beIN Sports, a major international broadcaster that holds the exclusive domestic media rights to broadcast the vast majority of WTA tour matches across France. Just one day after securing the initial injunction against the VPN providers, the broadcaster successfully obtained a remarkably similar site-blocking order directed at Cloudflare, seeking to choke off unauthorized access at the network infrastructure level.
When beIN Sports originally filed its initial injunction requests, the broadcaster asked the court to impose stringent financial penalties of €2,000 per day for each individual domain that two of the targeted VPN providers failed to block successfully. At the time, however, the presiding court refused to grant the penalty request. The judicial authorities reasoned that there was no substantive evidence showing that the providers harbored any willful intent to evade or fail to comply with the legal mandates. Furthermore, the court noted that if technical or operational problems arose during the implementation phase, the involved parties always possessed the legal avenue to return to court for clarification or enforcement. That is precisely the course of action that followed.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
As first revealed in investigative reports published by the French technology and telecommunications publication L’Informé, beIN Sports subsequently returned to the Paris Judicial Court to press its advantage. The broadcaster lodged formal complaints arguing that both the targeted VPN providers and Cloudflare had fallen short of fully and effectively blocking the designated pirate domains. Escalating its financial demands significantly, beIN requested that the court levy a punishing daily penalty of €10,000 for every single domain that remained accessible to internet users in France.
During the subsequent hearing, Cloudflare, alongside major commercial VPN providers Surfshark and Nordvpn—all of whom retained common legal representation—pushed back against the broadcaster’s aggressive financial demands. The companies pointed to substantial technical constraints inherent to their respective services and argued that they had acted in good faith, making their best possible commercial and technical efforts to comply with the broad judicial mandates. A fourth digital privacy service, Proton, was also named as a target in the proceedings but ultimately chose not to make an appearance at the scheduled hearing.
An examination of the technical implementation revealed that the blocking efforts undertaken by the intermediaries were indeed far from absolute or bulletproof. Cloudflare successfully blocked three out of the four targeted pirate sites, though it executed these restrictions strictly through its content delivery network (CDN) level. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN managed to block six out of eleven designated domains, and even then, those restrictions were applied exclusively through the Domain Name System (DNS) services operating on their servers located physically within France.
‘Reasonable Effort’ Standard Prevails
For the Paris Judicial Court, the imperfect measures deployed by the intermediaries were deemed sufficient under the law. In a pair of official rulings issued on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries and privacy service providers are legally obligated to make a "reasonable effort" to block designated unauthorized sites. Crucially, however, the court affirmed that these technical intermediaries are not legally required to guarantee a flawless, foolproof outcome—a legal interpretation that aligns directly with established case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
Review of the submitted case files demonstrated clearly that all of the responding companies had carried out the court-ordered blocking directives, at least in substantial 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 in its decision, as translated and quoted by L’Informé.
Despite the rejection of the penalty requests, the underlying blocking orders themselves remain fully in effect. They are scheduled to remain legally binding until the conclusion of the current WTA tennis season, which is officially set to wrap up on November 14. In the interim, beIN Sports retains the legal right to appeal the court’s latest refusal to impose fines.
This recent outcome closely mirrors a separate decision handed down by the same Paris court just last month in a piracy-related case brought by French pay-TV titan Canal+ against Cloudflare. In that proceeding, Canal+ was similarly denied its request for exorbitant daily penalties amounting to €50,000 per site. The court concluded in that instance that Cloudflare was only obligated to implement reasonable measures, a threshold the company satisfied by executing blocks through its CDN infrastructure.
The legal pressure from sports rights holders shows no sign of slowing down, with DNS resolver Quad9 positioned next in line to face similar demands. According to information provided by the Swiss-based privacy foundation, beIN Sports is demanding €10,000 per domain, per day from Quad9. Because the resolver hosts a vast number of potential domains, that daily penalty demand would rapidly compound to a staggering €580,000 per day.
Quad9’s operational position differs significantly from other defendants, however, as the non-profit resolver has not implemented any blocks on the domains in question. A judicial decision regarding beIN’s penalty request against Quad9 is anticipated to be released later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause
While rightsholders are grappling with setbacks regarding penalty enforcement, the broader legal war over the legitimacy of the blocking orders themselves has entered a holding pattern. The VPN providers involved are actively fighting the core blocking mandates through direct appeals, and that legal resistance has just been granted considerable breathing room.
Late last year, major privacy services including NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost formally appealed one of the pioneering VPN site-blocking orders. That specific injunction had been successfully secured by the professional French football league, the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), back in May 2025.
Acting upon a formal request filed by the legal teams representing the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal issued a significant procedural decision on September 30 to put the active case on hold. Rather than rushing to issue a ruling on the merits of the VPN providers’ appeal, the appellate court decided to suspend proceedings and wait for France’s highest court of ordinary jurisdiction, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court), to render definitive decisions regarding pending appeals tied to seven earlier rulings.
Those foundational rulings, which were handed down in March and May of this year, consistently upheld site-blocking orders that Canal+ had previously obtained against major DNS service providers. During the March proceedings, technology heavyweights including Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco lost their initial legal appeals attempting to overturn DNS-level blocking mandates. Following those defeats, several prominent DNS providers escalated the matter further by taking their fight to the Supreme Court.
Although the Paris Court of Appeal explicitly acknowledged that the technical and corporate details of the DNS cases are not identical to the ongoing VPN dispute, it determined that there is a substantial degree of legal overlap. The court concluded that waiting for the Supreme Court to clarify the overarching legal principles is the most prudent judicial course of action.
“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 stay order.
These critical overlapping questions encompass foundational matters of European and French digital law, including precisely which corporate entities can be legally compelled to assist in halting online piracy, whether France’s domestic site-blocking legislation fully complies with broader European Union legal standards, how digital copyright infringements must be robustly proven in court, and under what exact circumstances site-blocking measures can be considered legally proportionate.
While a definitive timeline for when the French Supreme Court will issue its rulings remains entirely unknown, the Paris Court of Appeal remains convinced that the high court’s eventual determinations will exert a decisive influence over the ultimate fate of the VPN blocking litigation.
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