Reddit’s mixed martial arts (MMA) community is up in arms over claims that Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is making DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) claims on dozens of fan videos featuring content of their favorite fighters.
According to Reddit user Bratt Mamley he posted a link to Facebook featuring a fan video he created of Anthony Pettis vs. Eddie Alvarez to his subreddit community on Thursday (Jan. 14, 2016). From there it slowly made its way to the top page of the 138,000-plus strong community of subscribers through “upvotes”.
But Mamley soon received a notice that his entire video collection was taken down from Facebook due to a copyright claim made by UFC. Distraught, his post about the DMCA claim on Reddit has generated close to 4,100 upvotes and received 860 comments.
Angry fans tried taking their complaints to UFC president Dana White who, apparently, doesn’t seem to know what his own lawyers are doing:
@Hey_im_Budz @Sholler_UFC @ufc what’s that mean?
— Dana White (@danawhite) January 15, 2016
UFC is notoriously protective of their video content for past events, most likely because they offer a paid subscription to their fight library at FightPass.com.
In 2010, the company served Google a DMCA notice to disable links to websites showing streamed pay-per-view (PPV) events, arguing it was enabling copyright infringement.
And in 2012 the UFC successfully shut down the Internet’s most popular gifmaker for events, ZombieProphet. Lawyers for the UFC threatened the hosting website with litigation and said Zombie Prophets’ gifs were “unauthorized videos.”
In March of 2015 UFC celebrated the arrest of a fan responsible for distributing more than 3.2 terabytes of data spanning 3,000 videos. UFC claimed the torrent uploader “Sir Paul” cost the company millions of dollars in lost revenue.
UFC is the only MMA organization that actively blocks attempts to replay unauthorized video or images from its events, something not done by Bellator MMA, World Series of Fighting or other professional fighting bodies.
Update
It would appear Bellator MMA parent company Viacom does slap DMCA on YouTube videos as well.