PPV Pirate ‘Was Just Playing’

Streaming copyrighted pay-per-view events is highly illegal. But one gamer found a cunning way to disguise his actions.

Most movie studios and sports broadcasters use some sort of automated recognition system to find unauthorized streams of their material and issue a takedown notice to the site in question. This usually leads to uploaders using tricks to beat the recognition such as shrinking the footage into one corner of the screen, reversing the image, or slowing down the playback.

One Twitch user found a new tactic however. He put up a stream of this past weekend’s Ultimate Fighting Championship event under the guise that the footage was in fact from the EA MMA video game. In fact he even overlaid footage of himself with a headset and controller, complete with button presses and vocal exclamations to match the on-screen action.

At the time of writing, the user’s Twitch channel was still online, but the “on demand” recording of his supposed game stream session had been taken down.

It’s hardly unknown for alleged YouTube videos of PPV events to turn out to be footage from the associated games, but this may be the first time it’s happened the other way around.