By Karyn Temple, Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel, the Motion Picture Association
Yesterday marked World IP Day – a time to reflect on the critical role intellectual property rights play in fostering creativity and innovation. This year’s theme, IP and Sports: Ready, Set, Innovate, captured the many ways strong intellectual property rights drive the sports world forward. That message was underscored by ACE’s Guillermo Rodríguez, Director of Live Content Protection, during the Copyright Alliance World IP Day panel last week.
From uniforms and merch to video innovations that put fans in the middle of the action to today’s “sports abundance” era where viewers have unprecedented choices and options across broadcast, cable, and streaming – it’s all undergirded by patents, trademarks, and copyrights that teams, creators, and engineers depend upon.
But IP rights, like all rights, lose their value if they are not protected and enforced.
That’s the threat right now – to teams, fans, and the global sports economy itself – from growing live sports piracy.
All forms of online piracy are harmful. But live sports piracy is uniquely corrosive. Matches and live events are extremely time sensitive—their value drops sharply after that final whistle blows, the clock runs out, and the winning team is announced. Live sports are among the last true bastions of “event tv,” bringing large audiences together to watch in real time and generating revenue that fuels player salaries, breathtaking stadiums, and ever-better production quality and storytelling. Sports piracy undercuts that economic cycle at its most critical moment, severely eroding the value that sustains teams, leagues, and the broader sports ecosystem. How bad is the problem? A February 2023 UK report found a 36% overall infringement rate for live events. In 2024, a reported 17 million viewers watched the Super Bowl on illegal pirate streams, despite the ease and ubiquity of free viewing options. Overall, piracy drains more than $28 billion from the global sports economy every year.
And the harm goes far beyond dollars and cents. A recent study found that fans who watched the Copa de Brasil soccer tournament on piracy sites were exposed to a gusher of deceptive ads, malware, and viruses. Brazilians who reported visiting piracy sites at least once a month are three times as likely to report problems with malware and viruses, four times as likely to have suffered a ransomware attack, and twice as likely to have been victimized by credit card or ID theft.
And as sports markets grow, these costs and harms do too. That’s why ACE brings together leagues, broadcasters, streamers, and rightsholders from around the world to fight back. In August 2024, we took down Egypt-based “Streameast,” the largest sports piracy network in the world at the time, shutting down 1.6 billion annual piracy site visits in a single blow.
These networks can be extremely difficult to track down and reach, operating in the shadows and jumping from domain to domain and host nation to host nation. Stopping them in real time takes extraordinary skill and resources and, even then, isn’t always possible.
Effective IP protection requires laws that are kept up to date to address how IP crimes have evolved over time. To truly protect American sports fans, teams, and rightsholders in the era of live piracy, the U.S. Congress should create a judicially supervised website blocking tool similar to those proven to work in over 55 nations around the world, including many of our strongest allies.
Judicial site blocking allows a court to order US intermediaries (most often internet providers) to block foreign piracy sites from reaching and victimizing American viewers. By blocking access to lawless foreign piracy sites from inside the U.S., judicial site blocking shuts down piracy in real time, critical in all cases but especially so in the case of live sports events. In dozens of countries around the world, site blocking has already been used to block access to over 28,000 illicit websites, protecting consumers from malware, viruses, and fraud, and ensuring that piracy doesn’t drain the value out of legitimate broadcasts and streams.
Fortunately, Congress has been working hard to close this gap and ensure that American fans, audiences, distributors, and rightsholders have the same protections as their peers in Britain, Australia, India, Indonesia, and more. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) has introduced strong siteblocking legislation and multiple bipartisan colleagues are engaged in developing a solution, including Sens. Tillis (R-NC) and Coons (D-DE). While questions were once raised about unintended consequences or the impact of site blocking tools on free speech, it is now clear based on well over a decade of experience around the globe, that we can establish a safe, effective, judicial site blocking remedy that protects consumers, distributors, and rightsholders, without any meaningful risk to lawful expression and participation online.
Sports is one of the great unifiers in our culture and it is fitting to celebrate the role of intellectual property rights in making the incredible moments and memories sports delivers possible. Let’s do the work to protect those rights for the next generation of athletes, communities, and fans.
