Kingvision Pay-Per-View Ltd. v. Lake Alice Bar

All four of these cases involve claims for damages for broadcasting fights without paying for the right to do so. There are no substantial questions of intellectual property law, though. The issues of substance have to do with relief from default judgments.

Facts.

These four separate cases arise out of prize fights between Mike Tyson and Peter McNeely, Julio Cesar Chavez and Pernell “Sweetpea” Whittaker, ■ and others. Don King, Inc. owned the rights to show the fights on the nights they occurred, on pay-per-view television, and licensed them to Kingvision Pay-Per-View, Ltd. The rights included not only the fight, but the preliminaries. Preliminaries are generally fights between prizefighters less likely to attract audiences who will pay top dollar to watch the featured fight.

I. Sports Pub.

Kingvision caused investigators to go to bars on fight nights, to see if they were showing the fights without paying for licens *349 ing fees. One of the investigators went into Sports Pub for about two minutes, used the bathroom, and saw that the preliminaries were being shown on two big television sets. He knew it was a preliminary for the Tyson fight because he saw “Kingvision Round 3”…