Top Rank Might Pursue Legal Action against those who Streamed Mayweather-Pacquiao Fight
Top Rank might seek legal action against all individuals who streamed the highly anticipated fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao last Saturday, May 2.
The co-promoter of the fight might focus on social media sites as well as companies that provided the links and technology to live stream the event.
"We'll have to pursue any people who are allowing people to distribute something that is behind a proprietary wall," Top Rank president Todd DuBoef told the Los Angeles Times. "We'll have to challenge those technology companies that are facilitating it and we're going to have to take a legal position against them."
The Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, which took place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, costs nearly $100 on pay per view. However, an unknown number of individuals throughout the world were able to stream the fight live at zero cost.
Some people revealed via Twitter that they used Periscope, a video-sharing app, to watch the game. A spokesperson for Twitter stated that they tried to take off stream links as they soon as they popped up.
"Members of the Periscope team were on staff Saturday night working to disable streams that featured copyright-protected material," a spokesperson said. "We received 66 reports from rights holders. We were able to act against 30 broadcasts within minutes in response to the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] requests. The remaining streams had already ended or were no longer available."
The spokesperson added, "We respect the intellectual property rights of rights holders and are working to ensure there are robust tools in place so we can react expeditiously."
The fight, which Mayweather won, was expected to break numerous records for both viewership and revenue. According to DuBoef, they are currently "tracking an exponential amount over the largest fight of all time [and they] think the results are going to be fantastic."
