Dish Network sued Fraifer and companies Tele-Center Inc. and Planet Telecom Inc. in 2016 for operating UlaiTV and AhlaiTV services that captured and retransmitted protected Arabic-language channels to U.S. customers through set-top boxes without authorization. The defendants went out of business by May 2017.
The defendants operated by capturing live broadcast signals of Dish's protected channels, transcoding them for internet streaming, and transmitting the content to users through content delivery networks and encoders. Dish held exclusive distribution rights for 21 Arabic-language channels under agreements with networks including MBC FZ LLC of the UAE.
The district court awarded Dish a permanent injunction and $600,000 in statutory damages after a bench trial, finding that defendants' use of CDNs and encoders constituted direct copyright infringement. The court determined Dish owned valid copyrights through its chain of title from the original content creators.
On appeal, defendants challenged Dish's ownership of copyrighted material and the infringement determination. The Eleventh Circuit applied UAE copyright law to determine initial ownership of the works, finding they constituted 'Collective Works' rather than 'Joint Works' as defendants argued, which supported MBC's initial ownership that was properly transferred to Dish.