The battle between content creators and online piracy is, at this point decades old. Any company that puts a major media event behind a paywall is going to risk having that content streamed out live from other, non pay-walled sources. But that doesn’t mean event organizers have to accept the fact.
At least, that’s what Triller seems to be hoping, following their recent PPV boxing event between Jake Paul and Ben Askren. Reported sales numbers for the fight card/concert have been as high as 1.5 million PPV buys (although more than a few people have claimed those numbers are vastly inflated). Whatever the final totals actually came to, however, Triller feels that they’ve missed out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue due to illegal streaming. In a statement to MMA Fighting, a spokesperson for the promotion made it clear they’ll be looking to recoup some of those supposed losses in a lawsuit recently filed to the US District Court in central California.
“It’s shocking to think a theft so grand can be done so blatantly and brazenly and steal with no remorse,” the spokesperson said. “There is zero difference between what they did and walking into a market stealing tons of a product and selling it at a discount in the parking lot. It’s neither civilly nor criminally any different and we are prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law. There were far over 2 million illegal streams, akin to hundreds of millions of dollars. Sites, mostly using Google’s YouTube such as FILMDAILY.COM, ACCESSTVPRO.CO, enONLINE2LIVESTREAM.US, CRACKSTREAMSLIVE.COM, ; SPORTS-TODAY.CLUB, MY-SPORTS.CLUB, BILASPORT.COM, TRENDY CLIPS, MIKE, YOUR EXTRA, ECLIPT GAMING, ITSLILBRANDON, and others are causing significant damage not just to Fight Club but content creators overall.
“People put a lot of hard work time and money into creating a product for the consumer and having it stolen and resold is terribly damaging. The good news is they are not protected by VPN masking or other firewalls as their activities are criminal and grand theft so we will ultimately find them and prevail not just for us but for content creators in general. We intend on working closely with the authorities as well to stop this highly illegal behavior”
The lawsuit reportedly covers 11 different streaming sites and 100 unnamed individuals, claiming $100 million in lost revenue as a result of two million illegal streams of the event. How much of that will actually turn into reclaimed revenue through the courts remains to be seen. Most likely the promotion is hoping their efforts will dissuade future piracy efforts, more so than generating the $100 million that Triller feels they missed out on.
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