Daily Beast calls out Barstool: “How they built an empire by swiping sports highlights”

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Four years ago, Barstool Sports was raked over the coals for taking a comedian’s video.

The sprawling and bro-tastic media company already had a reputation for stealing jokes, but that act of theft inadvertently revealed another way the site was profiting from content it didn’t own: an anonymous, seemingly random Twitter account which was in fact run by Barstool. The innocuous account, one of many Barstool used to harass the comedian, did nothing but rip and post copyrighted sports highlights and other viral clips, which were then embedded and shared by official Barstool accounts on Twitter

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It provided a crude but effective way for Barstool to prevent their legit accounts from accumulating Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) strikes.

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A new investigation by The Daily Beast found over 40 more anonymous Twitter accounts that give every indication of being controlled by Barstool. This network has laundered incalculable amounts of copyright-protected sports and entertainment videos and reaped billions of views over at least the last four years. For example: One anonymous account’s ripped video of The Weeknd’s Super Bowl LV performance racked up 36 million views for Barstool in less than 24 hours.

Taken as a whole, Barstool has built out an apparent system of organized copyright infringement.

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Barstool has been held up as one of the rare success stories to come out of 2010s independent digital media, though Portnoy’s recent reacquisition meant large-scale layoffs. They’ve slapped their name on an NCAA bowl game and a line of frozen pizzas, built brick-and-mortar bars and a sportsbook, and, as Ayers Badan bragged to the Post, count “some of the biggest blue-chip brands in the country” as sponsors.

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