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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
The UFC's support of SOPA - the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act legislation currently being bandied about in congress - brought it under fire from hackers on Sunday evening, as UFC.com for a time redirected to different domain names for a time.
The site redirected to UGNazi.com, with a header stating they were the "Underground Nazi H4ck3rGr0up" (screenshot below). One of the names taking credit for the hack goes by @JoshTheGod on Twitter, and they revealed that the UFC's support of SOPA and PIPA (the Protect IP Act) - argued again by executive Lawrence Epstein on Sunday in the Las Vegas Review Journal - was the cause of the action.
The UFC.com hack follows a series of more serious hacks from a group of hackers known as Anonymous this week, who took down a number of sites - including the FBI and Department of Justice - following an FBI raid on popular file sharing site MegaUpload this week.
UFC.com was back up shortly after it was taken down, and UFC President Dana White responded to several Tweets about the hack with little concern, saying - among other things - "I'm in the fight biz not the website biz. Who gives a s***!?"
Penick's Analysis: The UFC is immensely active in wanting to stop piracy, and they're right about how bad the issue can be online. They are absolutely hurt financially by rampant pirating of their events, so them wanting to support legislation against piracy makes sense. Unfortunately, the way these bills go about attempting to do that job is farcical, narrow-minded, and shockingly oppressive. I won't go into the entire situation here, as there are plenty of sources that can and have done a much better job of outlying the situation (for a recap on what's happened to date, check out Wikipedia's entry after their blackout this week), but the UFC's continued support of the bill is disappointing, at best.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
STAFF COLUMNISTS: Shawn Ennis - Jason Amadi
Frank Hyden - Rich Hansen
Chris Park - Matt Pelkey
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