The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is unable to get a tight grip on live streaming piracy. The company sends out thousands of takedown notices to protect its live broadcasts but nearly a quarter of these remain unaddressed after an hour. UFC calls on online service providers to step up their game, which includes ‘instantaneous’ takedowns and putting a stop to repeat infringers.

The UFC has promoted mixed martial arts fights for three decades. Today, however, the company is also fighting a battle of its own against online piracy.

Unauthorized views of UFC events have taken off in recent years. The organization is trying to put a stop to these pirated livestreams, but that’s proving to be a drawn-out battle.

Last week, General Counsel Riché McKnight shared UFC’s concerns with lawmakers during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing. While site-blocking discussions dominated the hearing, UFC’s comments are worth highlighting separately.

“Watch UFC Free”

McKnight’s testimony describes the piracy problem as widespread and costly. Pirated livestreams can get millions of views and these free alternatives result in lower subscriptions revenues.

The problem isn’t limited to people who record or stream UFC events on their phones. It regularly involves organized crime groups that tap into source signals and rebroadcasts them to profit from the advertising views they generate.

These people also brazenly advertise on social media platforms to attract viewers to their pirate websites, with slogans on social media sites such as “Watch UFC Free,” McKnight notes.

“[T]hey will then post those livestreams and recorded videos to those sites, and those videos will often collect hundreds of thousands or millions of views before they are taken down.”

“Expeditious”

According to UFC, several legislative hurdles prevent the company from being more efficient on the takedown front. They include the relatively ‘slow’ response time to DMCA takedown notices.

Under U.S. copyright law, online services are required to “expeditiously” respond to takedown notices if they want to keep their safe harbor protections. However, the law doesn’t define what the term expeditious entails.

“[Online services] often will claim to us that they are removing content expeditiously even when they allow a livestream to stay up for the entirety of a UFC event or remove recorded content days later,” Knight explains.

It can sometimes take hours or days before online services take action. This is a problem, since the value of UFC recordings and live streams diminishes quickly after the event is over.

The UFC calculated that for each event, it sends an average of 1,173 takedown requests for pirated livestreams and an additional 2,246 takedown requests for recorded content. 26% of the pirated livestreams remained online an hour after the takedown was sent. For recorded UFC content, 74% was still up after an hour.

Instant Takedowns

UFC suggests updating the legislative language to clarify the term “expeditious” as that leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

“This issue can be easily remedied by adding a statutory definition to clarify what ‘expeditiously’ means for the purposes of determining whether OSPs are eligible for a safe harbor from liability based on the infringing conduct of their users.

“Specifically, we believe the law should be clear that, for live events specifically, ‘expeditiously’ means ‘instantaneously’ or ‘near instantaneously’,” McKnight adds.

Replacing it with ‘near instantaneously’ still doesn’t set a specific time limit, of course. But it does suggest that taking more than a day to process a livestreaming takedown notice is too long.

[…]


A copy of the full written testimony from UFC General Counsel Riché McKnight is available here (pdf)

  • EeeDawg101@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    There are government decency rules about what can be broadcast on over the air television and i have a feeling people beating the shit out of each other wouldn’t be deemed acceptable. Would be nice, but don’t see it happening.

    • ME5SENGER_24@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      But the UFC had a deal with and broadcast fights on FOX. That deal ended in 2018, with 31 UFC on FOX broadcasts and then the UFC signed a deal with ESPN.

      So it’s been done before. I think the whole exclusive broadcast contracts they sign are what really limit their potential and they’re still trying to sell PPVs instead of bringing in their money through other channels.

      The Reebok, now Venom merchandise isn’t gonna move the needle. The NFL sells more than $4 billion in merchandise annually. I’m not saying the UFC can touch that number, just highlighting that there’s money to be made.

      If the UFC followed in the steps of another of Endeavor/TKO Holdings property, WWE, they could run 1-2 weekly shows on broadcast television and then hold PPVs a few times per year and throw massive fights on those cards. Get back into individual fighter merchandise, but produced on the corporate level and sell the hell out of it.

      They have over 600 fighters across 11 divisions. They’ve got the workforce and monetary backing to make it all happen.