The UFC have stepped up their efforts to stamp out online piracy, with the most recent example taking place last week. The Las Vegas-based fight promoter served streaming sites Ustream and Justin.tv with subpoenas in order to uncover the information of persons who have uploaded UFC PPV’s to those sites. The UFC cited some cold hard numbers to give credence to their argument that mass copyright infringement is hitting them in the bottom line:
For example, on January 2, 2010, over 36,000 people watched a live streaming feed of the UFC 108 Pay-Per-View event that was uploaded from a single IP address. Less than two months later, on February 21, 2010, that same IP address was used to upload multiple live streaming feeds of the UFC 110 Pay-Per-View event, which was watched by over 78,000 non-paying users.
Crunchgear brings us Ustream’s reaction to said subpoena:
Ustream was subpoenaed by UFC via Zuffa earlier this year to provide identifiable information on certain broadcasters, which Ustream fully complied with in a timely manner. Ustream continues to work cohesively with our premium content partners to prevent piracy, including UFC to legally stream officially-sanctioned UFC events. As part of our continued efforts to ensure strong content protection for our partners, we also recently updated our copyright protection tools to enable copyright holders to easily and quickly monitor, and take down infringing content on Ustream.
Ustream seems to be taking even further measures to ensure that infringing content is taken offline, but on the whole this has been an evolving process for the streaming provider. The site at one time provided a near free reign of infringement. As PPV providers like the UFC and WWE have stepped their efforts to curb infringement via these streaming site, measures have been implemented that haven’t completely stamped out infringement but have lessened the quality of the viewing experience of pirated materials. Ustream are further tweaking their system to come in to compliance with federal law and also keepin the good graces of all content providers not just the UFC. While past precedence means that Ustream and Justin.tv won’t face a suit from the UFC for the infringing streams, the streaming sites need to be ever vigilant in refining their copyright protection tools in order to make sure they are covered legally when such illegal streams do take place.