Twitch upset that copyright holders are enforcing their copyrights (Twitch DMCA storm redux)

Got this email from Twitch this morning:

SIGSTART,

We are committed to being more transparent with you about DMCA. We recently received a batch of DMCA takedown notifications with about 1,000 individual claims from music publishers. All of the claims are for VODs, and the vast majority target streamers listening to background music while playing video games or IRL streaming. Based on the number of claims, we believe these rights holders used automated tools to scan and identify copyrighted music in creators’ VODs and Clips, which means that they will likely send further notices. We are actively speaking with music labels about solutions that could work for creators as well as rights holders. This is our first such contact from the music publishing industry (there can be several owners for a single piece of music), and we are disappointed they decided to send takedowns when we are willing and ready to speak to them about solutions.

Protecting Your Channel
While the vast majority of you don’t include unauthorized background music in your livestreams, this recent batch suggests that some of you still do. The only way to protect yourself from DMCA notifications is to not stream music - or other copyrighted material - you do not have rights to. If you know you have unauthorized music or other copyrighted material in your past VODs or Clips, we strongly recommend that you permanently delete anything that contains that material. For your remaining VODs, we recommend you use the “unpublish all” feature and review any content for unauthorized music or other copyrighted material. If you believe your content has been misidentified or taken down by mistake, you can submit a counter-notification (see our DMCA Guidelines for requirements) or request a retraction from the copyright owner directly. For more information about what you can do to protect your channel please reference these resources including Creator Camp sessions, Help Articles and FAQs, and an overview blog post to supplement our Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, and separate Music Guidelines.

What Twitch is Doing
For our part, we are continuing to help creators minimize the amount of material that may infringe others’ copyrights. That includes educating creators and providing resources to understand the rules and risks concerning the use of music on Twitch as well as building new product features (such as the ability to unpublish VODs, view your strike count, strike notifications in the Creator Dashboard, multi-track audio support for OBS and more), investing in proactive detection and muting, and working with rights holders on longer-term solutions.

We know you may have questions about our conversations with music rights holders. These conversations are active and ongoing, and we continue to work with them to establish potential approaches that would be appropriate for the Twitch service and our entire community. When we have progress to discuss in that area, we will share it with you.

Look, I dislike copyright trolls as much as the next guy, but obviously these okes are going to use whatever legal tools they can to squeeze whatever money they can out of Twitch, which is technically profiting from its creators using other people’s copyrighted material.

That’s my knee-jerk. I’ll probably have a more considered opinion tomorrow :upside_down_face:

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Speaking of DMCA bullcrap… Not Twitch related, but does support the ‘squeezing’ claim.

Yup, the “copyright owner” of Ubuntu “reported an alleged infringement”…
Reddit thread

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Got the same email. These things flare up every now and again. Sometimes I even wonder if it’s real because the previous time suddenly they implemented the Monstercat licence whereby you could play any Monstercat music but then also get fast tracked to Affiliate. There was kickback from that and now it’s not available any more.

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