Triller Fight Club (TFC) has filed a lawsuit against 12 sites in the US District Court in the Central District of California in response to the widespread piracy of its pay-per-view (PPV) bout between Jake Paul and Ben Askren.
The event, headlined by the YouTuber and former MMA fighter on 17 April, was priced at $49.99 for viewers to watch. However, a dozen sites, most of which originated from video sharing platform YouTube, along with named sites such as filmdaily.com, accesstvpro.co and sports-today.club, stole the signal for the fight card.
According to the boxing events subsidiary of TrillerNet, the damages amounted to over $100 million, with TFC claiming over two million illegal streams were operating during the bout, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars.
“It’s shocking to think a theft so grand can be done so blatantly and brazenly and with no remorse,” remarked Ryan Kavanaugh, Triller’s Co-Controlling Shareholder. “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.
“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.”
Kavanaugh insisted that the boxing company will hold those responsible for ‘causing significant damage not just to Triller Fight Club but content creators overall’ accountable.
