Is suing fans the best way to combat internet piracy?
What such a strategy might ultimately cost the UFC and its parent company Zuffa, however, seems to be a question…
What such a strategy might ultimately cost the UFC and its parent company Zuffa, however, seems to be a question that the MMA giant hasn’t fully considered.
To hear the UFC’s Epstein tell it, suits against those who illegally streamed UFC events wouldn’t technically be suits against the organization’s own fans because “people that steal our stuff – they’re not our fans.” Except that they are, or else they probably wouldn’t be sitting in front of a laptop on a Saturday night watching a UFC event, whether they paid for it or not.
When Epstein says that those people aren’t the UFC’s fans, what he really means is, they aren’t the fans the UFC wants. That’s why the UFC feels just fine about threatening to sue those particular fans (though it’s arguable whether that threat is a legitimate one), and also why it seems to think this would ultimately be good for the organization. It wouldn’t, and there are a few different reasons why.
For starters, the UFC seems to believe that there are two types of MMA fans: the type who buys the pay-per-views, and the type who watches them illegally. In reality, the line between those two groups is probably a lot blurrier than Zuffa realizes. Chances are very good that some of the people who have streamed events in the past have also bought them, and probably will buy them again at some point in the future. Maybe they only pony up the $55 for the pay-per-view when the card is good enough, or when they can get friends to split the cost with them. Maybe they stream it when they only care about one or two fights, or when they’re simply too strapped for cash to afford it.
My point is, not all piracy is created equal, at least on the receiving end, and attacking viewers as if they are distributors could do much more harm than good.