Twitch Admits it Handled DMCA Takedowns Poorly

Twitch has acknowledged its fault in the way it has handled the DMCA controversy that put streamers at risk of losing their accounts because they played license music during their recordings. At the same time, the company says streamers aren’t out of the woods yet and strongly recommends they not play licensed music during streams as negotiations continue between Twitch and r In the first, detailed blog post about DMCA after streamers were hit with takedown notices en masse over the summer, Twitch explained that up until that point DMCA was not a major issue for streamers. “Until May of this year, streamers received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications each year on Twitch,” the company says in its blog post. “Beginning in May, however, representatives for the major record labels started sending thousands of DMCA notifications each week that targeted creators’ archives, mostly for snippets of tracks in years-old Clips.” [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2018/02/20/streamer-sues-twitch-over-suspension-ign-news"] We’ve covered DMCA in-depth before, but the gist is that when license-holder issues a DMCA takedown request, a platform — in this case, Twitch — must comply with the takedown first before a reviews process can be initiated. The mass takedown requests created a domino effect where suddenly streamers found several, maybe even hundreds, of years-old clips that were flagged as violating DMCA. These put streamers at risk of breaking Twitch’s three-strike rule fairly quickly. To help streamers, Twitch released a mass deletion tool that would help streamers purge their archives of videos, but streamers were undoubtedly not enthusiastic about deleting years of work. Twitch acknowledged that it should have taken better precautionary steps to prevent this. “One of the mistakes we made was not building adequate tools to allow creators to manage their own VOD and Clip libraries,” Twitch says. “You’re rightly upset that the only option we provided was a mass deletion tool for Clips, and that we gave you three-days notice to use this tool.” Twitch also acknowledged a lack of forethought in its toolsets for these situations, writing, “We could have developed more sophisticated, user-friendly tools awhile ago. That we didn’t is on us. And we could have provided creators with a longer time period to address their VOD and Clip libraries — that was a miss as well.” [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2016/09/12/twitch-chat-beats-a-chess-grandmaster"] Twitch has rolled out a Music tool that will let streamers play licensed music during their streams without worrying about DMCA takedowns. But negotiations with big music labels are ongoing, so in the meantime Twitch strongly urges streamers to not play recorded music during streams. The company says in the future it will roll out more tools to help streamers have greater control in managing their archives, control the audio in streams that potentially infringe copyright, and better tools to review DMCA notifications. But it might be some while before recorded music is safe to play during Twitch streams. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Matt T.M. Kim is a reporter for IGN.

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