Posted in: Games, Twitch, Video Games | Tagged: DMCA, Twitch

Twitch Rolls Out Another Round Of DMCA's From Music Industry

Overnight, twitch rolled out a couple thousand DMCA notices to streamers, some of which shut down channels completely due to copyrights. The company receives these from different companies within the music industry whenever a label decides a streamer has violated their copyrights. Whenever this many show up, it's usually an indicator that a single company has been keeping tabs for a while and decided to hit as many targets at once as a statement, which Twitch has to follow through with or else face legal action on their own. As part of this run, Twitch sent out an email message to everyone, which you can read below.

We are committed to being more transparent with you about DMCA. We recently received a batch of DMCA takedown notifications with about 1,000 individual claims from music publishers. All of the claims are for VODs, and the vast majority target streamers listening to background music while playing video games or IRL streaming. Based on the number of claims, we believe these rights holders used automated tools to scan and identify copyrighted music in creators' VODs and Clips, which means that they will likely send further notices. We are actively speaking with music labels about solutions that could work for creators as well as rights holders. This is our first such contact from the music publishing industry (there can be several owners for a single piece of music), and we are disappointed they decided to send takedowns when we are willing and ready to speak to them about solutions.

One of the high-profile people caught in the DMCA shutdown was that of WWE's Paige, as noted by the official StreamerBans page, she got hit with three DMCA marks and her channel no longer exists. As per Twitch's own guidelines, the first ban can last up until 30 days, but some streamers have been able to get their channels back within 7 days. However, break that guideline three times and your channel can be permanently banned.

Social media is already in a fury over the situation as people are claiming their streams are getting dinged when they don't even play music, meaning some of these are related to in-game music and sound effects. Another sticking point with many over the way the platform refuses to take a stance against the music industry as the platform itself is designed primarily for gaming. We reached out to Twitch for a comment on the latest string of DMCA warnings but did not receive a response by the time this story was published.

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