Streaming video game matches it is becoming a competitive alternative to the traditional consumption of multimedia content. Even the number of game streamers on Linux is growing in number. No wonder the content distribution industry has been launched by this new way of getting royalties.
Twitch is a video streaming platform born from a YouTube competitor named Justin TV who has since disappeared. Even if Its strength is the transmission of games or on demand, it also supports other types of content. It is considered one of the most important sources of Internet traffic.
For this, it is not surprising that representatives of major record labels will start sending you thousands of notifications for copyright infringement. Until May of this year, it only received 50 complaints per year related to the unauthorized use of music. Most of the complaints have to do with videos that have been uploaded for a long time.
The company decided to cut their losses, removed the offending clips, and warned streamers not to play recorded music on their streams unless they had the rights. or simply mute the game's audio. It should be clarified that all claims were directed at commercial music played alongside the game, not the game music itself.
This generated massive protests from users on social networks who uploaded videos without audio or with their own music badly played.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") is a set of US regulations that allow content to be created and shared using digital service providers such as Twitch. In return, those responsible for the site must offer a mechanism for copyright holders to complain about a use they consider inappropriate.
Twitch's response to angry users
With a post from the company blog explained:
This sudden flood of notifications surprised us as much as many of you. We also realized that we needed to provide streamers with more tutorials and content management tools to help them deal with this unprecedented number of notifications coming in all at once. So while we continued to remove the content these notifications were targeting as required by the DMCA, we understood that VODs and clips from years ago may not necessarily reflect your current approach to music. Therefore, we also stopped processing the deletion associated with these notifications to give them the tools, information and time they would need to comply with them.
In the same post they acknowledge their mistakes
One of the mistakes we made was not building proper tools to allow creators to manage their own VOD and Clip libraries. They are rightly annoyed that the only option we offered was a bulk clip erase tool, and that we only gave them three days' notice to use this tool. We could have developed more sophisticated and user-friendly tools long ago. We did not do that, it is up to us. And we could have given creators a longer period of time to sort their VOD and Clip libraries - that was a mistake too. We are truly sorry for these mistakes, and we will do better.
The company's tips are:
- Use freely distributed music. In the case of games, check if the user license allows the music to be transmitted.
- In the case of old videos, review them one by one and delete those that contain copyrighted content.
While they promised to improve the tools to give users greater control over the audio that is transmitted with video streaming.From the company they refused to make an agreement with the recording companies like the one YouTube has.
We are actively talking with major record labels about possible additional licensing approaches that would be appropriate for the Twitch service. That said, the current licensing concepts that record labels have with other services (which typically cut creators' income from paying record labels) don't make sense to Twitch. The vast majority of our creators do not include recorded music as part of their broadcasts, and the revenue impact to creators of such an arrangement is significant.