TorrentFreak

The frontline of online piracy liability keeps moving, and core internet infrastructure providers are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs.

In a significant ruling last week, the Paris Judicial Tribunal ordered Cloudflare to actively block access to pirate MotoGP streams, confirming that third-party intermediaries can be required to take responsibility.

The ruling follows a complaint from French entertainment powerhouse Société d'Edition de Canal Plus (SECP), which holds the rights to various sports broadcasts. In this case, the proceeding was filed to protect its interests in MotoGP events, which started a new season last month.

DNS Resolvers are Liable

The reasoning behind the blocking request is similar to a previous blocking order, which also targeted OpenDNS and Google DNS. It is grounded in Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code, which empowers rightsholders to seek court orders against any outfit that can help to stop 'serious and repeated' sports piracy.

This time, SECP's demands are broader than DNS blocking alone. The rightsholder also requested blocking measures across Cloudflare's other services, including its CDN and proxy services.

The 14 domain names

The legal paperwork cites 14 domain names, including motogpstream.me and livestreamhd247.live, but doesn't stop there. SECP also pushed for dynamic blocking, asking Cloudflare to act against future infringing sites identified by French media regulator, ARCOM.

Cloudflare's Failed Defense

Cloudflare put up a defense, arguing that unlike traditional ISPs, it isn't the kind of intermediary that's targeted by Article L. 333-10. The company said that its DNS, CDN, and reverse proxy services don't "transmit" infringing content in the way envisioned by the law. Instead, they merely route traffic or cache content passively, so strict policing obligations are not appropriate.

Cloudflare also attacked the proportionality and effectiveness of the requested measures. For example, it said that DNS blocking would affect a "negligible" number of users and could be easily bypassed by VPNs or other DNS resolvers, rendering these restrictions futile.

Cloudflare also warned that due to technical challenges, it could be difficult to accurately geo-restrict blocking measures to France, introducing a new risk of global collateral damage.

Court Dismisses Pushback, Orders Blocking Measures

None of these defenses convinced the Paris court, which rejected all of Cloudflare's arguments. For example, it disregarded the "passive" vs. "active" distinction, concluding that intermediaries such as Cloudflare play an integral role in accessing pirate streams. As a result, the company is required to block this content.

The potentially limited effect of the blocking order didn't change the court's view either. While Cloudflare's blocking won't put an end to piracy, it will have an impact, even if some people bypass the proposed blocking measures.

All in all, the Paris Court ordered Cloudflare to comply and block the listed pirate site domains within three days. The blockades should stay in place for the remainder of the 2025 MotoGP season, across all relevant services.

Future Pirate Site Domains are Covered

The order was issued last week and Cloudflare has already implemented it, with the court allowing Cloudflare to adopt its own technical measures. Visiting the blocked domain names from France will now result in an HTTP 451 error, indicating that they are now unavailable for legal reasons.

Error HTTP 451

Interestingly, the blockades may not stop at the 14 domain names mentioned in the original complaint. The 'dynamic' order allows SECP to request additional blockades from Cloudflare, if future pirate sites are flagged by French media regulator, ARCOM. Refusal to comply could see Cloudflare incur a €5,000 daily fine per site.

"[Cloudflare is ordered to implement] all measures likely to prevent, until the date of the last race in the MotoGP season 2025, currently set for November 16, 2025, access to the sites identified above, as well as to sites not yet identified at the date of the present decision," the order reads.

From the order

This latest French ruling is part of broader efforts by rightsholders to co-opt core internet infrastructure into their enforcement efforts. Mandatory blocking requirements, once largely confined to ISPs, are now gradually expanding to other intermediaries. The expansion is not just a French or European phenomenon; a proposed U.S. site blocking bill also envisions a key role for DNS resolvers.

_--

A copy of the Paris Court order, issued on March 28, 2025, is available here (pdf) _

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

When rightsholders feel that conditions are optimal, site-blocking measures are presented to countries as a proportionate, precise, and entirely reasonable response to rampant piracy.

Should there be a need for new legislation, care should be taken to provide room for rightsholders to maneuver, to ensure that adaptive pirates are placed under maximum continuous pressure.

Under intense pressure itself by an impatient United States demanding that piracy needed to be taken more seriously, Spain spent years doing just that. The success story includes over a decade of site-blocking that generated zero controversy.

Piracy blocking applications even appeared to decline in 2024. A far cry from the days when a call-out on the USTR's Priority Watch List seemed inevitable, but still light years adrift from the disaster playing out in Spain since February.

With Great Power Comes….Massive Blocking

In 2022 LaLiga and Telefonica, owner of broadcaster Movistar, found room for legal maneuver. Understandably frustrated that their premium live sports broadcasts were instantly pirated, the companies convinced a court that rapid, dynamic blocking would be a proportionate response to IPTV piracy.

These blocking orders presented new problems. The crisis currently playing out in Spain shows how easily circumvented technical restrictions can be rendered almost useless. This, in turn, triggered a disproportionate response leading to substantial collateral damage.

When enhanced privacy features at Cloudflare undermined blocking, the power of a new court order issued last December allowed LaLiga to block Cloudfare itself and by default, many thousands of innocent Cloudflare customers.

Block and Awe

After a court rejected appeals by Cloudflare and hacker collective RootedCON in March, LaLiga now appears to be blocking whatever it needs to block to get the job done. And it's a big job, as updates from sysadmin @jaumepons on X reveal.

300 of 12382 domains behind 1 IP address

According to @jaumepons, Cloudflare IP addresses are currently being blocked by LaLiga at the rate of 3,000 every week. For perspective, Italy's Piracy Shield caused uproar when it blocked less than a handful.

Each IP address serves thousands of innocent Cloudflare customers and whichever pirate streaming service happens to be taking cover among them.

Despite having no links to pirate sites, the number of domains said to be affected by IP address-based blocking appears to be disproportionate to the stated aim. The claim that many newspapers have been caught up in the dragnet is concerning; the claim below is more disconcerting than anything else.

????

Unsolicited Press Release

While we're generally averse to parroting press releases without broader context, a communication received late Wednesday piqued our interest and then proved unusually puzzling. The author is the Spanish non-profit DigitalES and at the time of writing the release doesn't appear on the group's website. Its intentions, however, are made clear right off the bat:

_DigitalES, the Spanish Association for Digitalization and the employers ' association for the telecommunications, technology, and digital innovation sectors, is calling for the cooperation of all Internet intermediaries to ensure compliance with the court order requiring the blocking of resources linked to pirated audiovisual content.

---snip---

This court ruling is based on the material impossibility of implementing DNS-level blocking as a measure against online piracy. The main reason is that websites with illegal content and the intermediary companies that connect them to the internet employ various techniques (such as ECH or Relay) to change their IP addresses and circumvent these restrictions. Therefore, the most viable solution is considered to be either directly blocking the IP addresses associated with pirated content, or a combined strategy that includes blocking domains, URLs, and IP addresses .

Despite the agreement reached with most of these web traffic intermediaries to implement this solution, some services are not implementing the court order._

Whether the overblocking situation is linked to lacking implementation at some providers isn't clear. In fact, the press release doesn't mention overblocking at all; it notes the failed legal actions by Cloudflare and RootedCON but says nothing about the controversial events that triggered them.

Other Relevant Details

It may be a coincidence that Telefonica, Vodafone, MásOrange, and DIGI, are directly linked to the blocking action in Spain, while also being members of DigitalES. That no mention is made of these companies in the DigitalES press release might be an oversight, but with vested interests in how the current situation plays out, a few extra details of their involvement may prove informative.

The blocking injunction obtained last December was a joint effort by LaLiga and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital (TAD), which operates the Telefonica-owned subscription digital TV platform known as Movistar Plus+. In January it was reported that Telefonica had retained the domestic rights to broadcast LaLiga matches until the end of 2026/27 season, in a deal worth €1.29bn (US$1.43bn).

The injunction protects this investment by providing the legal basis for blocking measures at four named ISPs;

• MásOrange: Operator of brands including Orange, Yoigo, Jazztel, Masmovil, Simyo, Pepephone, Lebara, Lyca, Llamaya, and Euskaltel. An agreement between Orange and Telefonica-owned Movistar and DAZN secured broadcasting rights for LaLiga matches.
• Vodafone: LaLiga matches are available on Vodafone TV through a deal with DAZN
• DIGI: Romanian telco sells access to LaLiga matches via its DIGI TV platform in Spain
• Movistar: Telefonica-owned telco (LaLiga shown on Movistar+)

The process through which blocking injunctions are obtained is typically non-adversarial. Ultimately signed-off by a judge, ISPs are indeed compelled to implement piracy blocking measures, albeit under pre-arranged terms to which they all agreed.

The theory is straightforward. LaLiga/Telefonica monitor the internet for pirate streams and send their IP addresses to the ISPs. Once the ISPs add those IP addressees to their internal blacklists, their own customers watching those streams can no longer do so.

The companies believe that with enough disruption, pirates will decide to go legal. How well that's going right is unclear. The massive overblocking of Cloudflare denies access to legitimate platforms for pirates and non-pirates alike.

A Surprise Intervention

According to RootedCON, Vodafone surprised by intervening in its case.

_One of the most controversial points in the development of the case has been Vodafone 's intervention: before the judge made a decision, it appeared to reject RootedCON's presence in the legal process. The operator maintained, now with the support of the judge, that the only ones entitled to challenge the ruling were the operators that were sued at the time by LaLiga and Telefónica.

However, they themselves have not filed their own request for annulment. "What Vodafone is effectively saying is that operators are happy to be forced to block."_

And as distributors of LaLiga content, purchased at considerable expense, that makes complete sense. As internet service providers knowingly blocking legitimate resources and their own non-pirating customers? Not so much.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

Posted from this RSS feed via bot, see !meta@rss.ponder.cat

Posted from this RSS feed via bot, see !meta@rss.ponder.cat