Twitch’s policy states that, “you cannot play copyrighted music during your Twitch streams without a licensing agreement from the label or the recording artist.” With that in mind, Twitch recommends streamers delete any previously-recorded videos-including past broadcast video on demands (VODs), Highlights, or Clips-containing copyrighted music, even if they have permission to play a song during livestreams. Twitch has a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy that permanently bans content creators if they accrue three warnings for copyright infringement. It depends on the content that streamers are using. As such, content creators were left scrambling amidst Twitch’s lack of clarity on what constituted as infringement – and unfortunately, it does not look like they will get it any time soon. This resulted in Twitch making the executive decision to warn and subsequently remove any infringing content from their website – a big blow to streamers because Twitch’s actions were equivalent to being written up at work, but the problem was not specified, and the corrective actions were left blank. In order for Twitch to avoid lawsuits for failing to abide by the notice and takedown procedure, they had to act fast to remove the infringing content. The Recording Industry Association of America (“RIAA”) issued 1,817 copyright notices to content creators in June 2020, which was a stark uptick from the ~710 notices that had been issued over the course of three years from the associations humble beginnings in 2017. If it is so simple, why is the DMCA coming after Twitch? Breaking this down further, websites like Twitch are immune from lawsuits as long as they comply with the notice and takedown procedure by providing users a DMCA policy, removing infringing material, and implements a counter-notice process. The three main changes were: (1) protecting access to or copying of a copyrighted work (2) providing web hosts and Internet service providers a safe harbor from copyright infringement claims and (3) criminalizing false copyright management information. law in line with the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. It was officially implemented in 2000 as an update to bring U.S. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) has been around since 1998. It does not help that Twitch’s most recent blog post fails to remedy the ongoing issues and begs the question of – why wasn’t something done sooner? This new round of carnage has left many streamers dissatisfied with Twitch’s response and confused on how to proceed. This comes as a follow-up to the battle that started brewing earlier this year. Content creators on the popular streaming website Twitch have once again been slammed with takedown notices.
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