The Erosion of Copyright: does Stake.com show we've given up on protecting IP?

ALSO: a new podcast episode about the ideology of Luigi Mangione

This is my penultimate newsletter of the year (yay?) before I clock off for a bit. I also fired up the ol’ podcast engine, for another episode of The Ned Ludd Radio Hour looking at the strange, and deeply online, political ideologies of Luigi Mangione. I was joined for that discussion by Io Dodds, a tech reporter for The Independent based in San Francisco. You can listen below.

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When Elon Musk introduced the ‘community notes’ feature on X, most of the content moderation fans watching were, briefly, impressed. It was a common sense solution, and something that had been trialled under the old Twitter leadership. The notes would function as a form of live fact-checking, alerting users to the presence of information that was false or misleading. And, at the beginning, they appeared surprisingly dispassionate: Musk himself has been ‘community noted’ a number of times.

But, slowly, they began to function differently. Too often they seemed ideologically driven and unable to separate opinion from the statement of fact. People on the left, particularly people in the debates about gender ideology, felt like central messaging was targeting them. That brief spark of trust in their neutrality evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. Now, on the rare occasions I visit X.com, most of the 'community notes’ I see are warning about hidden adverts for a gambling website called Stake, which, apparently, violates Twitter rules. And yet, despite this apparent contravention, the Stake logo is now adhered to thousands (possibly millions) of pieces of media, from photographs to videos. But before we come to the implications of that, let’s take a quick look at what exactly Stake is.

Founded in 2017 by Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, Stake is an online casino incorporated in Curaçao. In that sense, it is much of a piece with any number of online casinos – the real difference is, perhaps, the presence of Craven and Tehrani, Aussie billionaires who also co-founded the streaming platform Kick. Unlike other entrepreneurs who have made their money through the lucrative global gambling market, Craven and Tehrani understand the internet, and they understand its creators. That’s why they undertook a series of partnerships with content ‘aggregators’ (i.e. accounts that farm other people’s content and post it on a single feed, rather than content ‘creators’) to get the Stake brand out there amongst a Gen Z and young millennial audience.

The result has been the badging of an enormous amount of content with the Stake logo, and the subsequent re-badging of this content with an X ‘community note’. This cyclical process demonstrates just how toothless online regulation is. Despite apparently being in breach of X’s terms of service, these posts are only sporadically labelled with contextual information, and almost never actually removed (one would’ve thought that a ‘breach of terms’ message ought to automatically trigger deletion, but no). Similarly, here in the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been made aware of the surfeit of Stake ads and is said to be ‘considering’ a referral to the Gambling commission. “We think it is a legitimate regulatory objective to seek to minimise children’s exposure to age-restricted ads,” they said, back in October. But there’s no sign of anything happening, and no obviously confidence that they can proactively regulate this trend.

The issue is that many – if not quite all – of these content aggregators operate anonymously. Because gambling is the dominant source of income to business, and expenditure from consumers, within sports, that is the content most frequently targeted by Stake. They have seemingly partnered with accounts that repurpose and post sports videos, many of which are already carrying gambling advertising natively (in stadium banners, on club shirts etc). An example of one of these new partners is the account [@]UTDTrey.

‘Trey’ is identified by an avatar of the footballer Anthony Martial, who used to play for Manchester United but now plays for AEK Athens. His tweets are predominantly about Manchester United and the English Premier League, hence coming to the attention of the ASA. They are often accused of being ‘ragebait’ or ‘engagement farming’ but, all the same, he’s acquired a significant following. He has 1.2m followers and [@]stake in his bio. And yet his location is set as ‘Somewhere’, his real name obscured.

To be clear: the terms of Stake’s supposed sponsorship of these accounts hasn’t been revealed. It is unclear whether they operate under a directive to watermark copyrighted content with the company’s logo (a transparent violation, I would’ve thought, of intellectual property law in the UK at least) or whether they do it of their own volition, and Stake turns a blind eye. Stake, which is not registered in the UK and only partially operates in this market, would likely claim plausible deniability. After all, if you don’t even know who these content aggregators are, can you really be held responsible for what they do? It seems plausible that, if money *is* changing hands, it might be crypto, and thus hard to trace. All in all, it seems like something that’s going to be hard to tackle, and, frankly, the gambling industry has such a pervasive stranglehold on digital advertising that this should hardly be top of the ASA’s long to-do list.

What I’m more interested in is the slow erosion of copyright that we seem to be noticing in recent years. I was scrolling through Instagram reels, mindlessly (as if there were any other way), the other day, and I saw a video with the Stake logo on it. But it wasn’t being posted by a Stake-affiliate account: it was simply the version of the video that the person posting it had found. Which is to say that the source content had changed: it now had the Stake logo on it. And perhaps for several years, anyone looking for that specific clip will find it, with the Stake logo on, and repost it, with the Stake logo on. It is a form of forever advertising, like when you fire up an old DVD and sit through an advert for a cereal product that has long since been exposed as carcinogenic. The product is gone, but that advert is there, forever.

For some time, I’ve been surprised that the music industry is so complacent about the way that brands utilise their songs for social media advertising, without jumping through the same hoops that they would have to in order to produce a television advert. Perhaps it is accepted as part of the game on TikTok: you need your song to go viral in order to get the streaming numbers, and so you make it freely available to creators, including ones who are selling £120 leather satchels. The fact that they would have to pay tens of thousands of pounds to license the song in any other format is immaterial; the goal is total virality.

And perhaps this the gamble – no pun intended – that the Premier League and other sports broadcasters are making with Stake. After all, the accounts that are watermarking content are also massively signal-boosting the core product. Would the Premier League rather that UTDTrey’s 1.2m followers saw a 30-second clip of Amad Diallo lobbing Ederson or that they protected the integrity of their brand?

It’s a bit of a Sophie’s choice for prestige brands who are still experimenting with digital media. The Premier League’s official Twitter has some 45m followers and posts an ever increasing amount of content, that bears a faint logo of the league. But they cannot control the reposts of that content, nor who monetises it. This is not just simple download and re-upload; X has a function where users can, totally legitimately, use the video, natively embedded in their new post. And then they can earn money based on the performance/engagement with that post.

This is a thorny issue. The gambling industry is tightly regulated and most of the big players in the UK are mindful of the rules, not, I suspect, out of a sense of ethical obligation but out of a desire to avoid incurring needless fines. (Betway, for example, were fined £400,000 in 2022 for advertising on a platform targeted at children). But along with a decentralisation of the industry, we are also witnessing a deprofessionalisation. Anonymous participants, non-contract agreements, vague or totally obscured terms. This is just a volume game – get as many accounts with as many followers as possible to refer to your brand. It is a low overhead, but high risk, method of total brand immersion.

And the knock-on is a graffiti on the history of the internet. Intellectual property might be held as sacred to content creators, but the pact made with social media for its dissemination is a troubled one. It leads to adverts using pop hits (“that’s that me-espresso,” Sabrina Carpenter warbles, as steam rises from a hot cuppa Average Joe-uccino) without paying a penny, and football clips being used and reused, montaged and mashed-up, all with the logo of an online casino tramp-stamped on the bottom border. The danger is that if you keep devaluing your product in favour of ‘getting it out there’ you will eventually leave yourself in a position where you cannot row back. And what then? The genie does not go back in the bottle, the Stake logo does not come off the Best Bicycle Kicks video.