Last week, Beyond The Summit’s David "LD" Gorman announced that they had to take down thousands of Dota 2 videos due to a DMCA claim.
Twitch is without a doubt the most popular streaming platform. The purple giant went live in 2011 and over the years made it to the top attracting more and more content creators and viewers. Over the course of the past decade many aspects of the site improved while others still have a lot of room for improvement – like DMCA claims.
Gone, Like Tears in the Rain: 8 years of Dota 2
A week ago, David "LD" Gorman announced that Beyond The Summit had to delete a ton of Dota 2 videos.
(This was necessary to ensure we don't get banned for DMCA violations due to recent changes by Twitch. We literally had over 50,000 vods across all our channels, screening them individually would not have been feasible and there are no tools to automate the process sadly).
— LD (@LDeeep) October 24, 2020
The reason is a DMCA claim... of course. For anyone unfamiliar, DMCA stands for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This isn’t the first time Twitch streamers have had issues with DMCA claims but right now, it looks like the beginning of a new wave.
the Twitch DMCA bloodbath has begun, as hundreds of partnered streamers have received emails from Twitch as DMCA takedown notifications pic.twitter.com/zoIoI7Q7Xp
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) October 20, 2020
The music industry wants a piece of the pie and that’s perfectly fine. Anyone with a channel on Youtube is also quite familiar with the claims and demonetization of their videos. Twitch is arguably worse than the red platform.
The general principle about DMCA claims is that you first get a warning and if you fail to oblige (after a few strikes), you’re banned/deleted. Hundreds of content creators were swarmed with DMCA claims in the past week and things are not looking good for Twitch. The biggest problem is that Twitch doesn’t have a tool to identify which piece of content is in breach of the current claim.
It is INSANE that @Twitch informs partners they deleted their content - and that there is more content in violation despite having NO identification system to find out what it is. Their solution to DMCA is for creators to delete their life's work. This is pure, gross negligence. pic.twitter.com/mhdXU5lEc5
— Devin (@DevinNash) October 20, 2020
As mentioned, offenders will be given a deadline to remove the content. Identifying the exact piece is the real issue. For some channels that are just starting out it's not a huge problem to delete most videos but for others, it’s their life’s work.
In the case of Beyond The Summit, it’s eight years of Dota 2, dating back to 2012. Since the notice was so short, it wasn’t humanly possible to go through all the videos manually. Downloading and saving them was also out of the question due to the sheer size of the content.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
Let’s give Twitch some credit where it’s due. They may not have a tool that’ll help you identify which piece of content is breaking the law but there’s already a feature that’ll allow you to avoid future claims. That’s the Soundtrack.
With it, streamers can find copyright-cleared music that can be integrated into their videos. It’s certainly not a solution to the big problem but a lot of content creators will probably start using it given the number of claims recently.
We are incredibly proud of the essential service Twitch has become for so many artists and songwriters, especially during this challenging time. It is crucial that we protect the rights of songwriters, artists and other music industry partners. We continue to develop tools and resources to further educate our creators and empower them with more control over their content while partnering with industry-recognized vendors in the copyright space to help us achieve these goals.
Let’s just hope Twitch develops the necessary tools before streamers decide to jump ship.
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