This month, a French court went along with a demand from Canal+ to tighten up previously obtained anti-piracy measures. The court ordered Google,

OpenDNS Suspends Service in France Due to Canal+ Piracy Blocking Order

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2024-06-30 04:30:01

This month, a French court went along with a demand from Canal+ to tighten up previously obtained anti-piracy measures. The court ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to poison their DNS records to prevent these third-party services acting as workarounds for existing pirate site blockades. Cisco's response became evident on Friday when it withdrew its OpenDNS service from the entire country.

In 2023, broadcaster Canal+ went to court in France with the goal of obtaining an order requiring local ISPs to block over 100 pirate sports streaming sites.

The French court complied with the request; ISPs including Orange, SFR, OutreMer Télécom, Free, and Bouygues Télécom, were ordered to implement technical measures to prevent access to Footybite.co, Streamcheck.link, SportBay.sx, TVFutbol.info, and Catchystream.com, among dozens of others.

Since the ISPs have their own DNS resolvers for use by their own customers, these were configured to provide non-authentic responses to deny access to the sites in question. Somewhat inevitably, some of the ISPs’ users reconfigured their machines to use third-party DNS servers, included those provided by Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco.