Showtime Start Legal War Over Mayweather-McGregor 'Streams'


blackrican23

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Showtime is already staging a legal war against dozens of websites that are already promoting unauthorized streams of next Saturday's pay-per-view bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor.

Mayweather-McGregor, taking place on August 26th from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, has a hefty pay-per-view price tag of nearly $100 in the United States for an HD feed. 

Illegal streams are nothing new for the internet, and most - if not all - boxing and UFC pay-per-view events are illegally streamed on websites and social media.

The huge price tag of Mayweather-McGregor will entice a lot of fans to seek out alternative ways to view the fight for a reduced rate or by locating an illegal feed.

On Tuesday, Showtime filed their complaint in United States District Court in California - to prevent more than 40 websites from airing an unauthorized stream of the fight.

The legal papers note that the offending websites are "all currently formatted as Mayweather v. McGregor blogs populated with articles that are stuffed with keywords related to the fight. Plaintiff alleges that Defendants have engaged in such keyword stuffing as a form of search engine optimization in an effort to attract as much web traffic as possible in the form of Internet users searching for a way to access a live stream of the Fight."

Because of this strategy, Showtime argues that several of the potentially infringing sites appear in the top Google search results. The network says it expects the sites to be populated with links to sites offering the live stream right before the fight is broadcast.

Showtime is asking the court for an injunction to stop defendants and any of their partners or licensees from making the fight available for viewing or transferring their websites to another registrant or registrar.

A similar legal move took place back in 2015, when Mayweather fought Manny Pacquiao - which had an identical pay-per-view price tag.  Showtime and HBO sued for "anticipated" copyright infringement — and the court granted a temporary injunction. It ordered the sites to be taken offline prior to the start of the fight through the next morning.

http://www.boxingscene.com/showtime-start-legal-war-over-mayweather-mcgregor-streams--119518?print_friendly=1

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