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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
The UFC's parent company, Zuffa, LLC., continues on in their attempt to crack down on online piracy of their live pay-per-view events, as they announced on Friday that they have filed suit against Justin.tv, Inc for copyright and trademark infringement.
The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada, and insists that "Justin.tv’s repeated and ongoing failure to meaningfully address the rampant and illegal uploading of video of live Pay-Per-View UFC events by members and users of the Justin.tv website" are at the root of the lawsuit.
"Zuffa has attempted to work on numerous occasions with Justin.tv over nearly a two-year period to encourage it to prevent or limit its infringing activities,” Zuffa’s Las Vegas attorney, Donald J. Campbell said. “Regrettably, Justin.tv has not only turned a blind eye to the massive online piracy occurring on its website, we believe it has actually induced its users to commit copyright infringement thus leaving Zuffa no alternative but to take this fight to the courts."
Zuffa alleges that over 50,000 people illegally viewed their UFC 121 event in October. According to the release, third-party contractors removed over 200 streams of the event from the Justin.tv website.
This lawsuit follows up on Zuffa's subpoena of the company in the summer of 2010. In that case, the UFC sought the names of those users on Justin.tv that were uploading the events, but now they've turned their attention to the site itself.
Penick's Analysis: Even with this latest measure, it's going to be extremely difficult for the UFC to stop the piracy of their events online. They remain diligent in their efforts, and it's important that they do what they can to halt how widespread it has become for pay-per-view events, but with the internet people are always going to find a way around whatever restrictions get put in place. But this is a big lawsuit, and will strike a major blow for all content providers who have had their material pirated on sites such as Justin.tv.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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