Spanish court declines to fine NordVPN over LaLiga piracy blocking order

79 points by gslin 12 hours ago on hackernews | 72 comments

Three months after a Spanish court ordered NordVPN and ProtonVPN to block pirate football streams, NordVPN says the same court has refused to punish the provider for non-compliance. The VPN company says the Commercial Court of Córdoba rejected LaLiga's request for coercive fines, accepting that there was a genuine technical dispute over whether the blocking could be implemented.

nordvpn In February, the Commercial Court No. 1 of Córdoba labeled VPN services as “technological intermediaries,” ordering them to actively block IP addresses that host illegal LaLiga matches.

The “dynamic” injunction specifically targeted NordVPN and ProtonVPN and it was granted without the companies being heard. In addition, there was no immediate right of appeal either.

Both VPN providers questioned the Spanish court’s jurisdiction, as they are both incorporated outside the EU. NordVPN called the approach unacceptable and warned of overblocking.

LaLiga, in its turn, pointed out that NordVPN failed to fully implement the Spanish interim order, and it asked the court to punish the VPN provider with fines.

Fines Rejected

According to NordVPN, the court declined this request. In a blog post published today, the company says the Córdoba judge dismissed LaLiga’s request for coercive fines, because it could not conclude that NordVPN had deliberately and without justification breached the February order.

The technical evidence that NordVPN presented in court relied on two points.

1. The flagged IP addresses changed frequently, often within hours, so the provided lists no longer matched the live addresses by the time blocking could take effect.

2. The blanket IP-level blocking demanded would have resulted in broad overblocking, rendering thousands of lawful websites inaccessible to users in Spain and beyond.

“What the ruling does is confirm something we said openly from day one — the technical concerns are real and evidenced, and a Spanish court has now recognized that,” the blog post reads.

The court’s findings, as described to TorrentFreak by NordVPN, are more measured. The company says the judge accepted its technical evidence as relevant to compliance but stopped short of ruling its experts right and LaLiga’s wrong, instead finding that the two reports deserved “the same consideration” while reaching “the opposite conclusion.”

For a closer look, TorrentFreak asked NordVPN for a copy of the order, but the company said it could not share it at this stage.

Update: Shortly after publication, LaLiga informed TorrentFreak that it couldn’t share a copy of the order either. The league confirms that the decision merely sets aside the coercive fines while the proceedings continue, stressing that it does not exempt NordVPN from implementing IP blocks where LaLiga can prove piracy is taking place.

Not the Final Word

By NordVPN’s own account, the decision is narrow. The company describes it as a procedural ruling at the preliminary stage, not a judgment on the merits. This means that the main proceedings are still ahead.

At the same time, the VPN provider also points out that there is broader opposition growing against the Spanish blocking effort, where overblocking affected legal sites and services at Cloudflare, Vercel, GitHub, Docker, and elsewhere.

“Inside Spain, the consequences of indiscriminate IP blocking have become almost impossible to ignore,” NordVPN writes.

The friction has reached parliament. On April 29, a congressional committee passed a non-binding motion urging the government to reform Spain’s Digital Services Law, introducing a principle of “technological proportionality” to address and limit overblocking.

For now, however, the original February injunction remains in place and the underlying case continues. Whether the technical objections that NordVPN presented in court will also hold up when they are reviewed on the merits has yet to be seen.