Article L. 333-10 of the French Sport Code enables rightsholders to request blocking measures against named pirate sites if they can demonstrate “serious and repeated infringement” of their exploitation rights.

To prevent pirate sites from being accessed on French soil, rightsholders may request that “all proportionate measures” are implemented by any online entity in a position to help. The scope of Article L. 333-10 was always meant to be broad.

The first logical targets were local ISPs which easily fell within scope. Then, when inevitable circumvention raised its head, utilizing infrastructure beyond the reach of regular ISPs, Article L. 333-10 already had that covered.

Following a Canal+ complaint, use of third party DNS resolvers at Cloudflare and Google headed to court in 2024. Both were labeled intermediaries by the Court, and under the still unstressed scope of Article L. 333-10, both were considered capable of contributing to the suppression of piracy.

Canal+ / LFP Target Major VPN Providers

Having effectively added public DNS resolvers to the French blocking machine, attention turned to the next targets. In February 2025, it emerged that Groupe Canal + and Société d’édition de Canal Plus (SECP) had filed a case in November 2024 against NordVPN, CyberGhost, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN, and Surfshark.

The Canal companies alleged that “numerous” websites, accessible from within France, illegally streamed matches from various sporting competitions to which they hold the rights.

Since the VPNs’ subscribers were among those viewing the infringing streams, the Canal companies asked the court to compel the providers to implement “all measures likely to prevent access [to the illegal streams] from French territory,” including in all French overseas territories, “by any effective means”.

The VPN providers objected to the application on various grounds. Nord and Surfshark requested a declaration that the Canal companies lacked standing to act; as such, their application should be declared inadmissible. Proton sought a similar declaration while noting that the company lacked the ability to defend the requested blocking measures. The same assertion was made by CyberGhost and Express; all argued that Article L. 333-10 does not apply to VPN providers.

Other objections concerned jurisdiction and whether French law is compatible with EU legislation. CyberGhost and Express suggested a stay of proceedings pending a response from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the Dutch case, AFS et al.

Court Rejects VPN Providers’ Objections

In its decision published Thursday, the Court found that matters concerning the CJEU would have no impact on the current case. Calls for the Canal companies’ application to be declared inadmissible due to a lack of standing, were also dismissed, while a review of the allocation of rights pertaining to the various sports competitions raised no concerns.

Arguments that the VPN providers had no standing to defend themselves, due to Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code being inapplicable to VPN providers, fared no better.

The court notes that Article L.333-10 does not impose any restrictions on the targeted entity, adding that VPN providers are expressly covered under the Digital Services Act.

“Blocking such a service for certain domain names means that the provider of this service prevents its users from accessing the disputed domain names when using their VPN tool. Internet users using these virtual private networks would therefore no longer be able to access the disputed sites through this intermediary,” the decision reads.

“Consequently, the defendant companies, in their capacity as providers of virtual private network services, are technical intermediaries capable of contributing to remedying the harm that Groupe Canal+, SECP and Canal+ Rights claim to have suffered.”

Blocking Order Issued

The Court’s instructions and the full list of domains can be found below.

[The Court] orders the companies Cyberghost LLC, Cyberghost Srl, Expressco services, Express technologies, Nordvpn (Netherlands), Nordvpn (Republic of Panama), Surfshark Bv, Surfshark Ltd and Proton to implement, at the latest within three days following notification of this decision, all measures necessary to prevent, until the date of the last match of the championship of the Premier League for the 2024/2025 season, currently set for May 25, 2025, access to the websites and IPTV services identified [below] as well as to the IPTV sites and services not yet identified on the date of this decision, from French territory, including in the overseas communities, departments and regions, and/or by their users based on a contract taken out in this territory, by any effective means, and in particular by blocking the following domain names and associated subdomains……

The cost of blocking will be shared between the parties, with the details to be agreed at a later date. A request by the plaintiffs to compel the VPN providers to publish details of the case on their homepages for publicity purposes, was described as “inappropriate” and rejected by the Court.

The decision reveals that many of the domain names submitted by Canal for blocking, are already subject to blocking measures by French ISPs following notification by telecoms regulator ARCOM. Familiar brands include Footy Bite, Cric HD, Buffstreams, Futbollibre, Rojadirecta, and Crackstreams, among dozens of others. In these cases widespread piracy has already been established, but it appears that in-depth proof of infringement may not be a hard requirement.

“Since the burden of proof should not be unnecessarily complex and costly, the court cannot require the claimants to demonstrate access to the disputed IPTV sites and services by using each of the defendants’ virtual private networks, just as it does not request findings by using each of the internet service providers’ networks when a blocking is requested of them on the basis of Article L. 333-10 of the Sports Code,” the court notes.

Had comprehensive checks been carried out, questions may have been raised over the need to block pirate domains previously seized by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.

Other domains from the Canal+ list below were seized by ACE during the last few days, so blocking those domains will be unnecessary too.

The decision of the Court of Paris is available here (pdf, French)

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