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Twitch originally started as a place for gamers to broadcast their adventures and misadventures to a captive audience. However, it has long exceeded that singular purpose, expanding to cover art streams, how-to videos, and much more. Often times, these broadcasts would play music in the background, not knowing that they might be infringing someone’s copyright. That’s what the DMCA notices are for, and Twitch is now explaining the rather ugly situation its creators and streamers faced in recent months thanks to a massive influx of copyright infringement claims.
It is not unusual for services like Twitch and YouTube to receive such complaints that later result in the removal of an allegedly offensive video, at least until the matter can be resolved. However, since May, Twitch reported thousands of notifications of this type each week, which it found to be presented against extremely old VOD or VOD videos from years ago. The influx caught Twitch off guard and revealed how ill-equipped it was to handle DMCA cases.
The Amazon-owned service admits it could have done better, even before the onslaught of DMCA notices hit. However, beyond just handling those specific cases, he also admits that he didn’t have many tools to allow creators to manage videos beyond a massive “delete all” option and individually select the videos to be deleted. Unlike YouTube, it also didn’t have a tool to analyze videos and warn users that they were using copyrighted content.
Twitch promises these improvements will come but, for now, their only advice is not to use copyrighted musing on broadcasts. It has a collection of copyrighted music and also encourages creators to search for other similar sources of music.
Unfortunately, this episode also touches on the rather thorny issue of copyright and fair use. Games that are streamed, for example, may have non-obvious restrictions that prevent streamers from even playing music within the game. Despite the “Millennium” in its name, such laws have not been able to adapt quickly to the rapidly changing Internet landscape and we are confident that we will see more such problems as the record industry continues to swing the DCMA hammer everywhere. you see.
