Whether or not you’re aware of this depends on what corner of the Internet you tend to stay in, but the UFC has been hyper vigilant about animated GIFs of big fight moments. This is especially true on fight night itself, and they probably felt a need to attack it more when Ronda Rousey fights started fitting entirely into Vines and Instagram videos. In the past, they’ve caused issues for Zombie Prophet, who tweets all sorts of MMA GIFs. In October, they were even one of the sports organizations behind the complaints that caused the SBNationGIF and Deadspin Twitter accounts to briefly go dark.
That said, filing complaints under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) isn’t an exact science, especially when the process is automated. How so? Well, this happened last night:
The UFC just DMCAed themselves. #UFC197 pic.twitter.com/DeBYwn3anR
— David Bixenspan (@davidbix) April 24, 2016
Yes, the UFC has, in their own way, been tweeting some GIF and video highlights for a little while now, but last night, it went horribly wrong. Being that it’s the official, verified UFC account, I’m not sure how this happened, but it did, and the UFC got a GIF pulled from their own tweet.
Maybe they should get more humans involved in the process.