Numerous accounts and sessions, large and small, at risk after thousands of notifications for the use of music or fragments.
The Twitch streaming network has had a busy weekend after a wave of DMCA notifications caught the entire ecosystem by surprise, from major channels to the more modest. Basically, those responsible for the recording industry, who until now have been lax in monitoring this network, have begun to be more inflexible and have released numerous notifications that have wreaked havoc this weekend, which has been especially delicate for those They were beginning to see a path to professionalization and are now on the verge of losing all their content.
Danger to accounts
Basically, like any medium within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Twitch accepts that the owners of audiovisual rights can object to their use by any user, giving them viable tools to locate such content and request its removal. It is the same principle that you cannot upload and monetize a Shakira song on Youtube without receiving a warning (strike) practically automatically. Precisely in the Google service there was for a long time a whole “wild west” in which control was scarce, until the tools and the wills of the companies involved were more focused. Once that front is controlled, it seems like it’s Twitch’s turn.
Week This week, we’ve had a sudden influx of DMCA takedown requests for clips with background music from 2017-19. If you’re unsure about rights to audio in past streams, we advise removing those clips. We know many of you have large archives, and we’re working to make this easier.
– Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) June 8, 2020
However, each site has its own circumstances. Many streamers may be listening to background music, which is not the focus of their content but part of their environment, is this an illicit use of third party content? There are formal agreements by which a television channel is not going to be brought to trial because ambient music that does not have the rights sounds in a report, but they are very established elements and the world of streaming has its own particularities about which no clear rules have been set. There are other examples such as many streamers that use 5-10 second snippets of melodies that are not their own as sound effects, as a knock on effect, when they receive a donation or whatever circumstance they see, something that was considered “fair use / fair use “for being a small fragment, but it seems that it has not been considered as such, with the danger that it poses to its content files. In any case, those accustomed to using background music while talking / broadcasting are the main ones affected and among them are channels that Twitch cannot afford to lose.
Twitch Support has already released a statement explaining the situation, in which background music content has been reported on a massive scale for the first time from 2017 to 2019 and promising that they are working on solutions and tools to improve the management and control of the historical content, but while, the community is on the warpath.
