As the day of the long-awaited Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight is fast approaching, fans who want to see the event, but find the $90-100 pricetag prohibitive may look for alternative ways to watch. And by alternative, we mean those sites that pick up feeds and stream them for free. You may have used them to watch a boxing PPV, UFC fight, an overseas soccer match or even an event here in the States if you didn’t have a particular network which was airing something you wanted to watch.
Knowing in advance that fans will flock to these sites, HBO, Showtime, Mayweather Production and Top Rank Boxing have joined forces in seeking temporary restraining orders against boxinghd.net and sportship.org plus a number of “John Doe” sites which are promoting free streams of this Saturday’s fight.
The court papers filed in U.S. District Court in California say that the sites are infringing on HBO/Showtime’s copyright and the two networks have the rights to distribute the fight in the U.S. HBO/Showtime say in their filing that there “are no authorized online streams of the Coverage for delivery to United States audiences,” which crushes those who were hoping to see the fight on their computers or tablets.
The court filing notes that boxinghd.net and sportship.org have been promoting free streams of Mayweather-Pacquiao and neither have been authorized by HBO/Showtime/Mayweather Productions/Top Rank Boxing to do so.
As of this writing, boxinghd.net is down, but sportship.org is still up and is promoting its free stream of the fight.
When pay per views hit the air, fans who don’t want to pay the cost look to these sites. UFC has been aggressive in taking the streams down once they start, but the problem is that as soon as one goes down, another pops up. Can HBO/Showtime prevent every site that wants to stream the fight? Probably not, but in order to protect its intellectual property, the networks are at least willing go down swinging to prevent the online streams from eating into their profits.
[Deadline]
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