Why the UFC is trying to change copyright law

Art by Chris Rini

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)—the world’s premier mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion—has a livestream piracy problem, or at the very least, the company is convinced that it does. In August, the UFC submitted a letter to the United States Patent and Trademark Office requesting comment on “Future Strategies in Anticounterfeiting and Antipiracy,” co-authored by the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL).

The three sports leagues assert that illegal channels “have shown increasing sophistication” over recent years, with the heightened quality of mirrored livestreams having rendered the pirated version “indistinguishable from the legitimate feed.” To have this content removed from the internet, copyright owners must issue takedown notices to the infringing website’s online service provider (OSP) under the legal framework of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

DMCA is the foremost regulatory measure in U.S. policy for the protection of copyrighted material. Where it falls short, the letter claims, is in effective response time. An element of immediacy is a large part of the spectacle in sport, so when OSPs take hours or even days to remove illicit content, much of the value is already lost the moment results reach headlines. By that point, copyright takedowns affect relatively little.

In the letter, the sports organizations argue that DMCA, signed into law in 1998, is “not well-suited to address the present-day particular piracy issues,” as the ephemerality of pirated material makes legal recourse problematic under current guidelines. The UFC, NBA, and NFL subsequently request that DMCA Section 512 be amended, so that takedown notices sent to OSPs must be processed “instantaneously or near-instantaneously” instead of “expeditiously” (the present wording).