“Technical Knockout”, a student note by Keith Black, recently published in Fordham Law’s Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal, discusses Zuffa’s battle to combat online piracy of its pay-per-views. Specifically the note discusses recent decisions regarding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in federal courts, including a recent decision in Viacom v. YouTube.
Black discusses the trend in district courts to heavily favor websites, as opposed to content providers, and how that trend severely cripples Zuffa’s chances of preventing piracy. Specifically, Black hypothesizes that in any lawsuit brought by Zuffa under the DMCA against websites notorious for hosting live, illicit streams of its pay-per-views, said websites would be protected from liability for copyright infringement. The DMCA’s wide-reach safe-harbor might protect even the most nefarious websites from infringement liability. The article discusses how the DMCA provides Zuffa with well-intentioned, but ultimately ineffective, methods of protecting its copyrights.
Further, Black distinguishes live pay-per-view events should, from the static video posted on YouTube, and why the former is entitled to an entirely new, and currently not enatced, level of protection than the latter. Further, pending legislation is criticized for not being powerful enough to aid Zuffa’s fight against piracy. Black provides several remedial measures that could help Zuffa, including a federally sanctioned dialogue between content providers and websites hosting live streaming video to help stomp out live, streaming piracy.
The full article is available here.
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