A French appeals court has just tied a man's frozen bank account to a handful of posts explaining how to change your DNS. The Paris Court of Appeal ruled this month that roughly 197,000 euros belonging to a former Uptobox contractor stay frozen, not because he ran the file-hosting service, but because he publicly told users how to get around the court-ordered block on it.
What actually happened
Uptobox was one of Europe's larger file-hosting platforms until September 2023, when the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, whose members include Disney, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Paramount and Warner Bros., obtained orders that led to simultaneous server seizures in France and the United Arab Emirates. Before the shutdown, French internet providers had already been ordered to block the site.
The man at the centre of this ruling, known online as "Starouille", worked as a technical contractor on the servers. Disney argued he was a de facto director of the operation, pointing among other things to the CTO label he used on social media. The documentation told a duller story: a Technical Liaison Level 1 role at hosting provider Opcore, installing, maintaining and upgrading machines.
The posts that cost him 197,000 euros
While the block was in force, he posted on X that users should "change your DNS on all your devices", pointing to a page with the procedure, and mentioned an alternative domain. He added router-specific instructions for a popular French box. When another user on X asked whether this concerned a court order, he replied that Uptobox itself had not been condemned, only four ISPs had been ordered to block it.
- Seizure originally authorised: up to 16.127 million euros.
- Actually frozen: about 197,000 euros in a BNP Paribas account.
- Disney's claim after appeal: 306,000 euros, calculated from Disney+ subscriptions it says it lost between 2020 and 2023.
Why the money stayed frozen
In January 2025 an enforcement judge sided with the contractor and ordered the funds released, finding no proof of a management role. Disney appealed. This month the Court of Appeal agreed on the central point, Disney had not shown he was a de facto director, and still refused to unfreeze the money. The reasoning shifted: the posts showed he knew about the blocking orders and their copyright basis, and by publishing a workaround he made a future claim against him plausible enough to justify a precautionary freeze.
Two things matter here. This is a provisional measure, not a finding of liability, and the case on the merits is still pending. But the practical result is that publishing DNS instructions was treated as an act with legal weight of its own, separate from any role in running the platform.
Speech about circumvention, not circumvention itself
Site blocking in France has been expanding for years, from ISPs to infrastructure and privacy tools. A Paris court ordered five major VPN providers to block pirate streams, and earlier France required ProtonVPN to block a list of pirate domains. This ruling adds a new layer. It is not about a tool that bypasses a block, it is about a person describing how to bypass one.
That distinction has consequences well beyond piracy. Changing your DNS resolver is standard advice in security and privacy guidance, taught by network engineers, recommended for avoiding ISP-level filtering, and used daily by people with nothing to do with copyright. Google has told the European Commission that blocking at the DNS and VPN layer is ineffective and harmful precisely because it hits ordinary traffic. If explaining the workaround to defend a platform you work for can freeze your savings, the open question is where courts will draw the line for ordinary documentation, forums and support threads.
Where courts are drawing the line
European courts are not moving in one direction on this. The EU's top court held that VPN providers are not liable when users bypass geo-blocking, treating the technology as lawful. Meanwhile enforcement keeps widening elsewhere: Canada's Federal Court has just approved an order that covers pirate sites that do not exist yet. The Uptobox decision sits at the point where those two trends collide, protecting the tool while penalising the sentence that explains it.
For everyone else, the practical lesson is about your own connection rather than about publishing. Changing a DNS resolver only moves your name lookups; an encrypted tunnel moves the traffic itself and takes the resolver with it, which is why filtering at that layer keeps failing and why regulators keep circling it. If you want to understand what actually survives ISP-level filtering and what merely looks like it does, our guide to bypassing censorship and DPI covers the difference in detail.
