• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, September 10, 2015

Showtime wants a federal judge to shut down a site that apparently plans to stream Saturday night's pay-per-view boxing match between Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Andre Berto.

The site, mayweathervsandrebertolivestream.com, boasts that it offers one of the "best" ways to watch the upcoming boxing match. As of Thursday morning, the site was still live.

Showtime says in a complaint for "anticipated" copyright infringement, filed this week in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, that it hasn't authorized any companies to stream the fight online. Instead, the match will be available from pay-per-view distributors for between $64.75 and $75.95.

"In the absence of immediate, preliminary and permanent injunctive relief, Defendants’ conduct will cause Plaintiffs irreparable harm," Showtime alleges.

The company says it hasn't been able to learn the identities of the people behind the site, despite hiring a private investigator to find them. Showtime adds that the developers registered the site through a Panama-based "privacy protection service," which is keeping their names and addresses secret.

The entertainment company is requesting an order that would prohibit the site operators as well as "all other persons who receive actual notice of the order and who are in active concert or participation with any of them" from hosting streams of the fight.

Showtime and HBO took similar action this spring, after learning that Web sites planned to stream the match between Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.

In that case, U.S. District Court Judge George Wu issued a controversial temporary restraining order prohibiting the service providers Namecheap.com, Enom and Hostwinds from providing any services to the creators of the would-be streaming sites -- even though Namecheap, Enom and Hostwinds weren't notified about the case in advance.

The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized Wu's order, saying it marked "one of the worst parts of the ill-conceived, long-dead Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being brought in through the courtroom back door."

The EFF added: "HBO got an order to block content against those who act as intermediaries, even though they have nothing to do with the alleged illegality of the sites, are simply providing normal business services, and almost surely had no notice that they were about to be enjoined."

Despite the court proceedings, streams of the fight still surfaced on Twitter.