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UFC 312 Promotional Guidelines Compliance pay: Dricus Du Plessis, Zhang Weili lead with champ money

UFC 312 Promotional Guidelines Compliance pay: Dricus Du Plessis, Zhang Weili lead with champ money

USA Today09-02-2025

Fighters from Saturday's UFC 312 event took home UFC Promotional Guidelines Compliance pay totaling $254,500.
The program, a comprehensive plan that includes outfitting requirements, media obligations and other items under the fighter code of conduct, replaces the previous payments made under the UFC Athlete Outfitting Policy.
UFC 312 took place at Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney. The main card aired on pay-per-view following prelims on ESPN2/Disney+ and ESPN+.
The full UFC 312 UFC Promotional Guidelines Compliance payouts included:
* * * *
Dricus Du Plessis: $42,000
Sean Strickland: $32,000
Zhang Weili: $42,000
Tatiana Suarez: $32,000
Justin Tafa: $6,000
Tallison Teixeira: $4,000
Jimmy Crute: $6,000
Rodolfo Bellato: $4,000
Jake Matthews: $21,000
def. Fransisco Prado: $4,500
Gabriel Santos: $4,500
def. Jack Jenkins: $4,500
Tom Nolan: $4,500
def. Viacheslav Borshchev: $6,000
Wang Cong: $4,000
def. Bruna Brasil: $4,500
Aleksandre Topuria: $4,000
def. Colby Thicknesse: $4,000
Rong Zhu: $4,500
def. Kody Steele: $4,000
Jonathan Micallef: $4,000
def. Kevin Jousset: $4,500
Quillan Salkilld: $4,000
def. Anshul Jubli: $4,000
Under the UFC Promotional Guidelines Compliance program's payout tiers, which appropriate the money generated by Venum's multi-year sponsorship with the UFC, fighters are paid based on their total number of UFC bouts, as well as Zuffa-era WEC fights (January 2007 and later) and Zuffa-era Strikeforce bouts (April 2011 and later). Fighters with 1-3 bouts receive $4,000 per appearance; 4-5 bouts get $4,500; 6-10 bouts get $6,000; 11-15 bouts earn $11,000; 16-20 bouts pocket $16,000; and 21 bouts and more get $21,000. Additionally, champions earn $42,000 while title challengers get $32,000.
In addition to experience-based pay, UFC fighters will receive in perpetuity royalty payments amounting to 20-30 percent of any UFC merchandise sold that bears their likeness, according to officials.
Full 2025 UFC Promotional Guidelines Compliance payouts:
Year-to-date total: $871,500
2024 total: $8,280,500
2023 total: $8,188,000
2022 total: $8,351,500
2021 total: $6,167,500
Program-to-date total: $31,889,000
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie's event hub for UFC 312.

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Meet the fan who placed third against pros in Fanatics Games

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‘Elio' Review: Pixar's Space Opera Adventure Needs More Time on Earth

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The 143-page lawsuit against Midjourney filed last Wednesday is a simple copyright lawsuit, even if it comes at the intersection of AI and bigger legal debates about whether AI-generated material can be considered copyrightable. Disney and NBCUniversal allege that Midjourney is willfully infringing on their biggest characters and IP and making a profit from doing it. It claims that anyone with a subscription to use Midjourney's image generating tool — and soon its video generation tool — can prompt the AI model to create an image of Darth Vader or the Minions, and it will spit out an almost perfect copy. The lawsuit includes some convincing side-by-sides of the real movie stills and the images Midjourney has created. It's not as if those examples are a close facsimile that can be mistaken for something else, they're not a parody, and they're not a transformed iteration of existing characters; it's just an AI-generated copy. 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'I think that they have made very specific factual allegations in their complaint, probably wisely so, that it's not a lawsuit just about all AI. This is a very specific use that they're complaining about,' Nelson said. All this matters to Disney and NBCUni because it represents lost revenue. If someone can just generate an image with AI of their favorite 'Star Wars' character, why would they want to buy anything specific from Disney itself? It could also be damaging to Disney's brand if AI can easily generate images of Disney characters that are more adult in nature than they'd prefer and let the average user distribute that image widely on the web. Seilie said this could be a very narrow ruling, one that only impacts Midjourney and how it operates or needs to operate moving forward, but more likely, any ruling will cause other AI companies to be proactive and change what their models can do or how they're trained based on what the court decides. They don't want their own lawsuits if they can avoid them. It could also just be settled with Midjourney agreeing to pay Disney and NBCUniversal a licensing fee to keep creating copies of their IP. But Seilie expects this to go deeper and believes the studios will want a ruling of some kind — and will fight until they get one. Seilie believes Disney and NBCUniversal will want discovery with the ability to get a clear sense of exactly how Midjourney's models were trained and how they're used. 'The studios want the precedent here,' Seilie said. 'They want a district court opinion that says that scraping data for a training engine or using copyrighted material in training data is a copyright violation. I think they're gonna want a ruling that says that, and it'll probably go through appeals.' Precedent is the crux of the issue here, giving the studios clarity on exactly what can and can't be used in training AI models, whether it's licensing someone else's to make movies or training their own internally. Because the flip side, should the courts rule in favor of Midjourney, could be 'earth shaking' for how the studios do business. 'It would be a sea change in the way that copyrighted material works,' Seilie said. 'We would see a lot of changes in how studios operate or how creatives, frankly, operate.' Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie Nicolas Winding Refn's Favorite Films: 37 Movies the Director Wants You to See

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