Foxtel and Facebook prepare to shut down rogue Mayweather-McGregor fight streams

Social media services have signalled that they will take a harder line on unauthorised streaming of this weekend’s fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor then they did in the much-pirated battle between Antony Mundine and Danny Green in February.

Mumbrella understands that Foxtel will for the first time tap into new rights-protection offerings provided by Facebook to shut down individuals who attempt to rebroadcast streams of Sunday morning’s fight.

“Facebook takes intellectual property rights seriously,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mumbrella. “We have robust measures in place to help protect intellectual property rights including reporting tools, IP policies, Audible Magic and Rights Manager.”

Part of the Rights Manager toolkit includes a reference library where rights holders can place reference material to expedite shut down requests.

“We check every Facebook Live video stream against files in the Rights Manager reference library, and if a match surfaces, we’ll interrupt that live video,” the Facebook spokesperson said.

“Video publishers and media companies can also provide reference streams of live content so that we can check live video on Facebook against those reference streams in real time. We are working closely with Foxtel to help them protect their rights with respect to the fight on our services.”

Mumbrella understands Foxtel will be implementing Facebook’s Rights Manager technology for this event, having not made use of the technology previously. Foxtel was invited to comment for this story but had not responded at the time of publication.

However, Twitter does not appear to have similar tools available for rights holders with the company’s representatives directing Mumbrella to the Periscope Media guidelines which state “We will respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement that comply with applicable law and are properly provided to us. If you believe that your content has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, you can report it to us here.”

Meanwhile, Foxtel is offering of a one-off streaming service for subscribers may address some of the criticism that being asked to subscribe to the service for a single event was unreasonable. The price of watching the fight via Foxtel’s Main Event brand is $59.

The move comes against a backdrop of increased activity against pirates. In August, the Federal Court order 127 sites to be blocked to Australian users while in the US, as the Hollywood Reporter reported two weeks ago, more than 40 websites have been shut down by an injunction issued by rights holder Showtime.