UFC Pirate Ordered to Pay $32m in Damages Says He Was Bullied and Paid Nothing

It very well might be good for the copyright holder. There is obviously a benefit to buzz around your content, and piracy helps generate that buzz all the same. It's not cut and dry.

What's more, brands like UFC have other ways of generating revenue than just licensing fees. A person may not be able to afford a subscription, but they might still be eager to buy an official UFC T-shirt.

"We find movies with prerelease piracy are associated with lower revenues despite the [Word of Mouth] effect. Critically, however, we show a positive correlation between postrelease piracy and WOM volume, and we extend the field by finding that the presence of postrelease piracy is associated with an approximately 3.0% increase in box office revenue. We also note the impact of a raid by the Swedish Police that temporarily took down The Pirate Bay website in December 2014. The period when the site was down experienced a decline in WOM volume and revenues, consistent with the effect of lower postrelease piracy predicted by our models."

Does Piracy Create Online Word of Mouth? An Empirical Analysis in the Movie Industry

Shijie Lu, Xin (Shane) Wang, Neil Bendle

DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2019.3298

I mean HN probably skews towards people who could easily afford the subscription, but it could be a legitimate benefit to the UFC brand to maintain the engagement of fans who can't afford to pay. Those people may lose interest if they can't watch at all, but they might be able to afford the subscription in a few years. High school/college students are one demographic that comes to mind, but this could easily apply to adults trying to escape poverty as well.

I don't know which way the balance swings in terms of people who can afford to pay and choose not to vs. people who can't afford to pay, but I think with something like the UFC that relies to some degree on fan culture for its appeal there's a clear benefit from having more people watch it even if those additional viewers don't pay.

This seems like an unnecessarily absolute (and needlessly insulting) statement. There are reasonable arguments for piracy benefiting the producer in the given case, where the likelihood of a sale having been lost is theoretically low.

Are PPV fights discounted if you have Fightpass?

Seems like a nice way of teaching them a lesson without being completely harsh. The thing the kid here doesn't understand, they get caught for pirating again by another organization, that set of lawyers now have documentation that they didn't learn their lesson from their last tango. They will pursue full damages and collect since any public apology will be meaningless.

And yea, there are settlements like this. For one, to hold certain IP rights, you have to defend them, even if you dont want to. Because if you dont, someone else can use that as a case you're not protecting your IP, thus party 2 can go around and sell it without legal recourse. This was a slap on the wrist that actually makes me like the UFC even more now.

>settlement amounts levied against teenagers

From the article:

>and not be as cocky like I did back when I was 27

I'm not sure if 27 qualifies as a teenager. He was 27 when he was pirating UFC. He's slightly older than me if he was 27 in 2014.

Wow, I'm shocked by your anger. His disowning the petty concept of a legal apology written in his name seems totally reasonable, mostly because the recipient is the UFC, and not an individual who suffered any kind of legitimate harm.

I don't know how he was caught, but he did do an interview that explained the tools and methods he was using: https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-debut-super-smooth-video-to... (His online name is "Secludedly").

I always assumed they would have a VPN or VPS in a country that doesn't have to listen to the UFC.