On May 2, while the rest of the world was busy watching the Floyd Mayweather/Manny Pacquiao fight, more than 1,500 private investigators employed by a company called J&J Sports Productions were out in search of bars, restaurants, and other establishments showing the fight illegally. Rather than pay a licensing fee that typically costs between $3,000 and $7,000, these places decided to show the fight to their customers without paying a dime. And now, they're facing ridiculously large fines for doing it.
J&J paid about $7 million for the commercial rights to the fight. So they're currently using the information found by their PIs to dish out fines to about 1,000 businesses. Those fines start at around $10,000, but they could end up totaling more than $100,000 and land some people in prison. It's a pretty drastic measure for J&J to take, but according to company owner Joe Gagliardi, it's a step that they need to take to recoup as much money as possible.
"We have to catch as many as we can to protect the people who pay," he told USA TODAY Sports.
What's amazing is that there were only about 4,000 licenses sold to businesses who wanted to show the fight, and an additional 1,000 decided to show the fight without paying for it. So that means that about 20 percent of the businesses that showed the fight on May 2 did so illegally. That's a high figure when you consider how diligent J&J appears to be when it comes to handing out fines to those who don't pay them.
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[via Boxing Junkies]
