The High Court has struck out Entain’s copyright claims against the businesses behind matched betting sites Outplayed.com and OddsMonkey, 11 months after the operator filed the case.
Mr Justice Cawson ruled at a case management conference that Entain had not pleaded the copyright element of its claim to a standard the case could proceed on. The trade mark claims, which the defendants accepted were sufficiently pleaded and had a real prospect of success, continue.
Entain issued proceedings in August 2025 against the operators of the two sites, alleging both trade mark and copyright infringement. The company, which owns Ladbrokes, Coral and bwin, has described the matched betting model as “parasitic”.
The authorship problem
Copyright claims in England and Wales require the claimant to establish who created each work, when it was first published, and what in it is original. Entain’s pleadings did not do that. The defendants argued that much of the material relied on was designed by outside agencies, which would leave copyright with those agencies unless it had been assigned to Entain in writing.
Entain told the court it was in the process of obtaining the necessary assignments. Cawson was unimpressed by the timing.
“I do not consider that it can be appropriate for claimants to say that they are in the process of obtaining the requisite assignments as late in the day as the case management conference, after the proceedings have been on foot for some 11 months.”
Citing the authority on the point, the judge found that “authorship-based qualification fails for want of authors”. A claimant that cannot name the authors cannot show the works qualify for copyright protection in the first place, whatever the merits of the infringement argument behind them.
Trade mark claims survive
The trade mark claims were always the stronger half of the case, and they are the half that now carries it. Those claims turn on the use of Entain’s brand names and marks by the matched betting sites rather than on the ownership history of design assets, so they avoid the evidential chain that defeated the copyright element.
Entain said after the ruling that it has “strong grounds for our claim and remain confident in it”.
What Entain is trying to stop
Matched betting sites sell subscriptions and software that identify bookmaker sign-up offers and free bets, then calculate an opposing lay bet on an exchange so the user locks in a return whichever way the event goes. The technique turns promotional spend, which operators budget as an acquisition cost, into a transfer to users who will never become profitable customers.
Operators have responded for years by restricting or closing accounts. Litigation is the newer route, and it is a harder one, because the sites are not taking bets, not operating without a licence, and not obviously doing anything a court would treat as unlawful on its face. That pushes an operator towards intellectual property arguments, where the case stands or falls on how the material was created and who owns it.
Entain has taken a more litigious line across several fronts in the past year. It has pursued licence security in regulated markets while pressing commercial disputes elsewhere, and it is not alone in testing the courts: Crypto.com and Robinhood have taken their own betting fight to the US Supreme Court.
A short window to replead
Cawson gave Entain a short window to amend the copyright claims. If the operator cannot produce the assignments and identify authors, publication dates and original elements within it, that part of the case falls away permanently and the litigation narrows to trade mark infringement alone.
The practical lesson for in-house teams is procedural. Design work commissioned from agencies does not belong to the commissioning company by default, and an operator that has spent a decade outsourcing creative production may not hold the rights it assumes it holds until someone checks. Entain is checking at the case management conference stage, which is late and expensive.
The trade mark claims still have to be tried, and the outcome will tell other operators whether the courts offer a usable answer to matched betting or whether account restrictions remain the only one.
Source: High Court of England and Wales
