Square Ring Sues UStream for Pay-Per-View Piracy
Square Ring, Inc., the promotional company owned by Roy Jones, Jr., was the entity behind "March Badness" a hybrid boxing/MMA card March 22, 2009, that featured Bobby Lashley in the main event. Square Ring has now sued UStream for copyright infringement, alleging that the company knowingly allowed users to upload and illegally watch streaming footage of the pay-per-view event.
Copyright laws prohibit copying or re-broadcasting someone else's program. Thus, if UStream was directly putting copyrighted MMA events online, it would certainly be liable. The grey area here is that UStream isn't posting any content directly. Like YouTube or a typical internet bulletin board, users post the content that appears on UStream. Typically, when a company just provides the space for others to speak, it is protected by "safe harbor" provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The protection is not absolute, however, as companies like Napster found out.
Square Ring's legal theory is, in a nutshell, that UStream knew copyright infringement was taking place and allowed it to happen. In fact, before March Badness, Square Ring warned companies like UStream that it would crack down on internet piracy.
Pirating pay-view events is as old as the events themselves, but the internet presents a whole new set of challenges. It's especially difficult for MMA promoters who serve a young, tech-savvy fan base. Dana White has acknowledged that the UFC had an "incredible underground internet fan base," reported to have kept the sport of MMA alive in the lean years when its pay-per-view events were banned by cable distributors.
The UFC has attemped to capitalize on the marketplace of the internet, offering live broadcasts of UFC events on Yahoo! for $44.95. The flipside is that it also has to deal with mirror sites, like this one registered to a user in Istanbul, which offer the same broadcasts for substantially lower fees.
Like Viacom's ongoing lawsuit against YouTube, this case could have a dramatic impact not only on how MMA fans watch future broadcasts, but how user-generated content is distributed on the web in general.
