UFC support for SOPA inspires Anonymous attacks, inflicts collateral damage

Donald Cerrone, left, trades punches with Nate Diaz during their UFC lightweight mixed martial arts match Friday, Dec. 30, 2011 at The MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. Diaz won by unanimous decision. (AP Photo/Eric Jamison)

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) specializes in knock-outs. Recently, the UFC found itself fighting an invisible foe in an Internet cage-fight over its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, contentious anti-piracy bills.

Numerous accounts on Twitter, allegedly associated with Anonymous — a leaderless group of politically motivated hackers purporting to fight for worldwide Internet freedom, attacked UFC President Dana White last week for his company’s support of the bills and for making what they deemed “too much money.”

The bills, which would have given the Justice Department the authority to obtain a court order to block foreign website domain names found to be facilitating the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, attracted online protests that sucked the wind out of the sails of supporters.

White, with an estimated net worth of over $150 million, has on numerous occasions donated to charitable causes straight out of his own pocket.  He fired back: “who the fuck are u to tell me what I should have and shouldn’t have!? U guys talk about freedom and BS but think I have to much $?”

White told his assailants that he did not know who they (Anonymous) were and was only concerned about dealing with the piracy that affected his business. He even agreed with the hackers that the bill wasn’t perfect, yet the barrage continued. When White called them “terrorists,” “cowards” and challenged them to attack him, the hackers were only too happy to oblige.

The charge was led by Anonymous-affiliated accounts that claimed to have posted White’s personal information –including his phone number, Social Security number and mailing address — on the programmer site Pastebin.

White later denied via Twitter that it was his personal information the hackers posted, but rather information belonging to other people, including the leaked information of Las Vegas woman Julie Breeler, who was bombarded over the weekend with phone calls from people who saw the information posted online.

“We’re all for free speech and the marketplace of ideas,” Ike Lawrence Epstein, executive vice president and general counsel for the UFC, told The Daily Caller. “I think it says a lot about these people when all they want to do is hurt somebody. It’s completely inconsistent with the values that these guys are trying to espouse.”

“I can’t tell you the groundswell of support we’ve received, and a lot of it has been coming from people who had issues with SOPA and PIPA,” Epstein told TheDC. “All we’re trying to do is advocate for legislation to be changed.”

This was not, however, the mixed martial arts organization’s first round with hackers and online pirates. In fact, the assault on White was only the latest in a long string of attacks from hackers on UFC, a company that developed a business model highly dependent on corporate sponsorships, event ticket sales and pay-per-view buys.

Epstein told TheDC that over four years ago the UFC started to notice a significant problem with taped events and archived material showing up on sites like YouTube and DailyMotion. Three years ago, the company saw the advent of live streams of its pay-per-view events.

“The value of our content is higher when it’s live, and it was something that scared us,” said Epstein. Pay-per-view buys are where the UFC makes “the lion’s share of its revenues.”

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