Canal+ wins new battle against piracy

Google, Cisco (OpenDNS) and Cloudflare have received an order from the French courts to block a list of pirate sports streaming sites, at the request of Canal+. Cisco’s response was swift, as OpenDNS has been unavailable in France since Friday.

What is DNS anyway?

DNS (Domain Name System) was invented to make it easier to find a specific site on the Internet. In this way, DNS maps a human-readable name, such as a domain name (logical address), to an IP address (physical address). The DNS servers used for this purpose are called “resolvers.”

Canal+ obtains DNS blocking of certain pirate sites

Canal+ pays a lot of money to obtain the broadcasting rights for top-notch sports content such as the Champions League, the Top 14 and the British Premier League. Under these conditions, the encrypted channel is doing its utmost to fight against pirate streaming sites and IPTVs. In 2023, Canal+ obtained DNS blocking from French Internet service providers for more than 100 pirate sports streaming sites.

But some Internet users use alternatives such as VPNs or third-party DNS from Google, OpenDNS (Cisco) and Cloudflare. Canal+ has therefore decided to go a step further by asking the courts to order these third-party DNS to block approximately 117 pirate domains incriminated. The encrypted channel won its case and users of these three DNS resolvers can no longer make the link between these domain names and the server’s IP addresses.

OpenDNS leaves the French market

The decision of the Paris Court of Justice, published by our colleagues at l’Informé, sets out the arguments of the defense:

« The proportionality of the requested blocks is contested by the defendants. Google, Cisco and Cloudflare claim that these measures would be unnecessarily complex and costly since there are many other ways to block all access to the disputed sites. Furthermore, the infringements in question would not be irremediable since it would be sufficient to use a VPN or another alternative DNS service to circumvent the block. ».

Arguments rejected by the court and which seem to have led to a radical decision on the part of OpenDNS (Cisco) which in a block article announced its decision to suspend its service in France and Portugal:

“As of June 28, 2024: Due to a court decision in France issued under Article L.333-10 of the French Sports Code and a court decision in Portugal issued under Article 210-G(3) of the Portuguese Copyright Code, the OpenDNS service is currently unavailable to users in France and certain French territories as well as Portugal. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

There is no shortage of alternative DNS

While the DNS of ISPs and those of web giants are the most used, there are many alternatives, as specified by Stéphane Bortzmeyer, DNS specialist. They cite other European resolvers such as DNS4ALL, dns.sb, FND or even his own. Enough to raise the question of the relevance and effectiveness of such a court decision.