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UFC Takedown Notices Include Lots of Porn

Make no mistake about it: UFC President Dana White absolutely hates it when people stream UFC fights on the Internet. So much so, in fact, he has been incredibly outspoken about making such an act a f...
UFC Takedown Notices Include Lots of Porn
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  • Make no mistake about it: UFC President Dana White absolutely hates it when people stream UFC fights on the Internet. So much so, in fact, he has been incredibly outspoken about making such an act a felony. With that in mind, it stands to reason the UFC has no hesitation about issuing DMCA takedown notices to Google on a regular basis. These requests, however, seem to use an incredibly wide net–in other words, bots–to find sites worthy of being taken down.

    The results of these bot-based searches are, as pointed out by Torrent Freak, takedown requests for sites that may not actually be infringing on the UFC’s content; that is, unless the UFC (or its parent company Zuffa) dabbles in the pornography industry. While some of the infringing sites were, in fact, streaming UFC fights, others included in the DMCA report were offering material of a much more adult nature, something the following screenshot reveals quite well:

    UFC DMCA Takedown
    Click to enlarge

    Of those ten sites, only one was offering content owned by the UFC. The others? Probably not so much, again, unless the UFC/Zuffa is investing in porn on the side. While this may not seem like a big deal, because, hey, content infringement is content infringement and while the UFC may not own the all of the copyrighted material in its request, it is acting like a good citizen by reporting the misdeeds of others. That, however, gets away from the meaning behind DMCA complaints, which were intended to focus on the copyrighted content owned by the entity issuing the complaint, which was not the case regarding the UFC.

    Furthering this point is the following header from the complaint in question:

    This is submitted for my client Zuffa LLC
    These links are facilitating piracy of my client’s work
    The work can be seen by visiting their site www.ufc.com
    The item this is relating to is Ufc content

    Unless I’m mistaken, I’m pretty sure you can’t see Rocco’s Psycho Teens 4 at UFC.com, unless there’s some kind of hidden web portal common users don’t know about. As the Torrent Freak article points out, this is fantastic example of how using bots to populate DMCA takedown requests can lead to unfortunate and ineffective situations like these:

    Instead of pinpointing specific pages carrying UFC torrents for example, the crawlers will target any other pages (even those created dynamically by search engines) that link to them, meaning that the generated DMCA notices deindex hundreds of other items that have nothing to do with the specific rightsholder. This, while often leaving the actual torrent page intact.

    Killing the page, but not the torrent, is a meaningless gesture if ending piracy is the intended goal. With that in mind, should Google even acknowledge complaints that are so wildly inaccurate?

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