14 DAY TRIAL // The 17-years-old free fighting championship seems to have put its foot in the door regarding online piracy. In a two-month span, UFC filed two major lawsuits against a bar owner from Boston (early January 2010) and Moazzam Gandu, the owner of Rage-Stream.net (mid-February 2010).
After a tumultuous career in which piracy practically saved its life, UFC has turned against illegal file shares and online broadcasts. Before making it big at the start of the 2000's, UFC was a little league in the free-fighting world almost shut-down and bankrupted in the late 90's. While TV stations and pay-per-view distributors were dropping UFC due to its high violence content, fighting fanatics and dedicated followers kept in touch with the sport by passing around VHS videos of their events.
Luckily, in 2001, the Fertitta brothers acquired the circuit and after major changes, the fights were brought to pay-per-view TV and a new found glory. Unfortunately for the Fertittas, this also meant that piracy grew exponentially with its TV success. As subscriptions grew, so did the piracy and illegal streams to their fights.
Following in the steps of RIAA and its anti-piracy plan, UFC management testified in late December 2009 in front of the US House Judiciary Committee, accusing various Internet-based companies of intentionally allowing copyrighted UFC streams to be broadcasted through their platforms.
The testimony reads, “As you will see today, there exists an increasing number of Internet sites that enable the theft of live sports programming. Sites like JustinTV, UstreamTV, LiveStream, TVU, channelsurfing.net, adthe.net, Sopcast, TVAnts, and myp2p.eu, for example, regularly make available real time streaming of live sports programming, uploaded we believe either directly or by the users of these sites.”
UFC's legal office closely followed the direction given by their management and in early January 2010, filed a lawsuit at the District Court in Boston against bar owner Derek Brady for displaying the “UFC 104” show without an appropriate license to do so. A license like that normally costs between $500 and $1,500, depending on the bar's capacity. The lawsuit asked for $640,000 in damages, plus legal fees.
A few days ago, UFC filed another major lawsuit, this time against Moazzam Gandu from Stafford, Virginia, the owner and operator of Rage-Streams.net for various copyright infringements. These included: the broadcast of illegal streams depicting UFC events, asking a $6.99 fee for every UFC show, using the UFC logo to promote his website and the ability to save UFC shows to the visitors’ local computer after paying for the event without any prior written approval from UFC.
The lawsuit is asking for $150,000 per copyright infringement, the legal costs and reclamation of the site's revenue. The service was taken down quickly after the lawsuit was filed.
Following this later lawsuit, Lawrence Epstein, UFC’s General Counsel, told MMAJunkie that “We take down more streams now than we ever have […] At every event, it’s more and more and more. The good news is that the tools that we have in our ability to discover these online streams have gotten better, too.”