Twitch Says It's In Talks To License Music, Tells Users To Delete Videos With Unauthorized Tracks (variety.com) 76
In a lengthy blog post, Twitch told streamers that they must stop playing recorded music on their streams (unless it's officially licensed) and that "if you haven't already, you should review your historical VODs and Clips that may have music in them and delete any archives that might." Variety reports: The Amazon-owned live-streaming platform also claimed that it is "actively speaking with the major record labels about potential approaches to additional licenses that would be appropriate for the Twitch service." However, the company also said that the "current constructs for licenses" that record labels have with other services (which typically take a cut of revenue from creators for payment to record labels) "make less sense for Twitch." "We're open-minded to new structures that could work for Twitch's unique service, but we must be clear that they may take some time to materialize or may never happen at all," the company said in the blog.
Twitch's music-copyright communique comes after several major U.S. music organizations -- including the RIAA, the Recording Academy, the National Music Publishers Association, the Music Managers Forum, the American Association of Independent Music and SAG-AFTRA -- sent a letter last month to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (copying Twitch CEO Emmet Shear). The letter, among other things, accused Twitch of "allowing and enabling its streamers to use our respective members' music without authorization, in violation of Twitch's music guidelines." Twitch said it was caught off guard by the music industry's crackdown on unlicensed music on its service. According to the company, starting this May, reps for music companies began sending thousands of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) copyright-takedown notices targeted at users' archived content, "mostly for snippets of tracks in years-old clips." Before then, Twitch said, it received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications per year.
Twitch said it analyzed DMCA notifications received from the end of May through mid-October and found that more than 99% of them were for tracks that streamers were playing in the background of their stream. Twitch apologized to creators for the angst the DMCA takedowns have caused, noting that a warning email it sent to many last month about the videos deleted from their accounts "didn't include all the information that you'd typically get in a DMCA notification." "We could have developed more sophisticated, user-friendly tools a while ago. That we didn't is on us," it said. "And we could have provided creators with a longer time period to address their VOD and Clip libraries -- that was a miss as well. We're truly sorry for these mistakes, and we'll do better."
Twitch's music-copyright communique comes after several major U.S. music organizations -- including the RIAA, the Recording Academy, the National Music Publishers Association, the Music Managers Forum, the American Association of Independent Music and SAG-AFTRA -- sent a letter last month to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (copying Twitch CEO Emmet Shear). The letter, among other things, accused Twitch of "allowing and enabling its streamers to use our respective members' music without authorization, in violation of Twitch's music guidelines." Twitch said it was caught off guard by the music industry's crackdown on unlicensed music on its service. According to the company, starting this May, reps for music companies began sending thousands of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) copyright-takedown notices targeted at users' archived content, "mostly for snippets of tracks in years-old clips." Before then, Twitch said, it received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications per year.
Twitch said it analyzed DMCA notifications received from the end of May through mid-October and found that more than 99% of them were for tracks that streamers were playing in the background of their stream. Twitch apologized to creators for the angst the DMCA takedowns have caused, noting that a warning email it sent to many last month about the videos deleted from their accounts "didn't include all the information that you'd typically get in a DMCA notification." "We could have developed more sophisticated, user-friendly tools a while ago. That we didn't is on us," it said. "And we could have provided creators with a longer time period to address their VOD and Clip libraries -- that was a miss as well. We're truly sorry for these mistakes, and we'll do better."
(unless it's officially licensed) (Score:5, Informative)
Guess what, the DMCA takedown bots don't care if you've licensed or not.
They'll strike you down regardless as youtoubers have found out.
The funniest ones are where the bots struck the music author's videos.
So overall it's not worth it to license the music, you'll just have more hassle to prove that you own the music while your revenue is taken or worse, video blocked.
Re:(unless it's officially licensed) (Score:4, Insightful)
Guess what, the DMCA takedown bots don't care if you've licensed or not. They'll strike you down regardless as youtoubers have found out.
The funniest ones are where the bots struck the music author's videos.
So overall it's not worth it to license the music, you'll just have more hassle to prove that you own the music while your revenue is taken or worse, video blocked.
Sadly, bots attacking their own legitimate clients is equal to your car insurance company being the cause of the accident.
If they want to sell their bullshit bot service as "valuable", then there should be legal recourse when bots fuck up. Period.
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Re:(unless it's officially licensed) (Score:4, Interesting)
Bad analogy. Takedown bots doing bad takedowns might be the equivalent of insurance companies doing bad claim refusals, but not causing accidents. You lose credibility when you catastrophize like that.
The problem is for YouTube creators it is catastrophic, because of the strikes system they can get their whole account disabled based on fraudulent claims and the levels of appeals and recourse available to them are poor. They can lose significant income or have it diverted elsewhere, they may be unable to upload new content or be unable to return to YouTube entirely until a big public fuss is made.
Whilst YouTube is partially to blame for this it is the media/record companies that have been demanding it is tilted this way. Given how much YouTube and Twitch are becoming competitors to TV and traditional record company business models in the under 40s and especially the under 30s, one might even call it unfair competitive practices.
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If you want a sure thing, go into Wall St. fuckery.
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I feel bad for almost everyone suffering from onerous copyright law.
Which, actually, is everyone.
The only people I don't feel bad for are the people I am constitutionally incapable of feeling bad for, which doesn't include streaming stars but does include everyone knowingly issuing bogus DMCA takedowns. Their punishment should be not being allowed to consume any copyrighted media for the rest of their lives.
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I feel bad for almost everyone suffering from onerous copyright law.
Which, actually, is everyone.
The only people I don't feel bad for are the people I am constitutionally incapable of feeling bad for, which doesn't include streaming stars but does include everyone knowingly issuing bogus DMCA takedowns. Their punishment should be not being allowed to consume any copyrighted media for the rest of their lives.
I've bought some albums in the past after hearing some music from them in online videos. Looks like all that goes away. The stupidity of the Takedown system is mind boggling.
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True analogy. You fail to see the colluding, overarching, all-consuming power of the insurance companies.
Insurance companies often wage "cold war" tactics against clients...perhaps quietly not mentioning the fact that you're not covered for any accident involving someone with no insurance. Or perhaps other fine print tactics they're re-writing now regarding COVID and life/health insurance policies. Flood insurance company says your flood zone technically moved mid-summer?...wait, it was filed "publicly",
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What it needs is for one big streamer with deep pockets to issue a few thousand counter notices and bill them for the legal costs and lost revenue.
It's pretty shitty of Twitch to have not handled this better. Provide some tools to temporarily hide affected videos while the mess is sorted out, rather than forced deletion.
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the cool cats these days hire a musician to create a unique piece of music for their videos and sell them full rights. Then, they upload the song to a digital music distribution service to get it into ContentID. Then, they copyright claim their own video.
Nobody else can take down a video if you have a copyright claim outstanding against it already
Yes make music diverse (Score:2)
Deletion isn't working (Score:4, Informative)
There are multiple reports of streamers deleting the content as requested just to continue to get DMCA notifications/strikes as while it appears to the streamer the clips have been deleted it is still available in Twitches CDN from alternate links.
https://www.ginx.tv/en/twitch/... [www.ginx.tv]
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It's not on the streamer to take down content when Twitch receives a DMCA takedown. And the music publishers should not be sending DMCA notices directly to streamers. If you are the target of a DMCA takedown, and you do not wish to file a counter-claim, you don't need to take any action. It's on the platform to remove the content.
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This is true. I could have worded my point better. What I wanted to highlight is that Twitch are digging a deeper legal hole for themselves. They are punishing and therefore alienating streamers who are doing everything they are asked (and therefore streamers possibly might have a legal case themselves against Twitch, especially in the EU and other areas where right to be forgotten law may apply for incomplete deletion of data) while at the same time failing to properly handle the DMCA notices and actual
Tax music used for commercial purposes (Score:1)
OK as long as users dont leave (Score:3)
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That's the real problem, there aren't viable alternatives.
There is YouTube but it's live streaming features are very poor in comparison to Twitch, and it pays a lot less. Twitch is a community too, if you go somewhere else you lose a lot of revenue just by not being part of it.
Social networks and user-generated-content sites really need some interoperability to prevent these kinds of de-facto monopolies.
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They are told “those are private companies, they can do whatever they want”. They’re also told “nothing prevents you from building your own platform”.
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In this case Twitch's entire business model is that you work for them as an independent contractor, unpaid but you keep some of your tips and can have side gigs like Patreon.
Twitter doesn't have that kind of relationship with users.
They want to eat cake and have it + the bakery and (Score:1)
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And i doubt anyone goes on twitch to listen to the music
Actually there are things other than video games on Twitch. There are live streams from nightclubs such as Club Mogra in Akihabara, and some people do DJ mixes on Twitch.
I've been confused by all this, because there is already a copyright scanner that mutes sections of the video, right after the live stream ends. But it doesn't seem that there is any later re-scanning of videos. Apparently part of the problem is older videos from before the MAFIAA's recent interest a few months ago, and this includes "clip
clueless whiners (Score:2)
Re:clueless whiners (Score:4, Insightful)
If Big Tech makes their product less enticing great more people will get back to living life.
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This is a problem inherent in the law. While the DMCA requires a statement in the takedown notice that the complaining party has a good faith belief that the use infringes a copyright, there's no direct recourse if they lie about that.
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Now lawyers can outright lie to courts and nothing meaningful happens.
Our current legal system is based on power and money, not fair and equal justice for all
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Lawyers are officers of the court(s) to which they are admitted, and can be disciplined and disbarred for lying to a judge. I don't know if all lawyers take that seriously, but the one who I had cause to retain took that responsibility very seriously.
But a takedown notice isn't a court filing, and doesn't have to be made by a lawyer. When a bot files a takedown request, I don't see how the claim of good-faith belief in unauthorized use can be made with even a whiff of seriousness. The law should be chang
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"But I was getting away with it this whole time" is not a valid defense for breaking the law.
It seems a good enough defense for you.
After all you used words in your post that I own. You owe me money for that. You didn't know.
Yet you still will refuse to pay for what you aren't entitled to use. You'll probably even make up some additional excuse why you don't owe me money!
Wait. It's 2020 (Score:4, Insightful)
And Twitch is just learning about the DMCA now?
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nah, it's more that RIAA and Co have just discovered that Twitch is owned by Amazon and they actually have some money. and, you know, when you have some money, suddenly a lot of people are starting to express concern whether you owe them. seems like a natural thing to happen :)
Re:Wait. It's 2020 (Score:5, Insightful)
And Twitch is just learning about the DMCA now?
DMCA users are just learning about Twitch now.
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Standard RIAA operation is to ignore copyright violations while a market is being established, so that users depend on it, and then come in with the pickaxe handles and demand money which they will "fairly" distribute to the artists. If you come in too early, the site just shuts down.
Luckily for them, copyright isn't like trademarks where you lose them if you don't defend them.
Music Industry shouldn't be this powerful (Score:1, Interesting)
It's on us. We're truly sorry. (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's on us. We're truly sorry" costs absolutely nothing therefore it means absolutely nothing. They can do it again and apologize again, and again, and again... They should just add a clear warning to all creators "We reserve the right to delete any and all content you upload at any time without any notice, and the most you will get from us is a generic apology. You have been warned, so go ahead an upload."
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They should just add a clear warning to all creators "We reserve the right to delete any and all content you upload at any time without any notice, and the most you will get from us is a generic apology. You have been warned, so go ahead an upload."
It's in the Twitch ToS. You did read the small print before accepting them, right?
Twitch reserves the right to remove, screen, or edit any User Content posted or stored on the Twitch Services at any time and without notice
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Probably something like this [sourceforge.net] but with a 100 petabytes more training data for the neural network.
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I'm not trying to be a dick, but you spent a long time writing something that amounts to "im unfamiliar with this technology and probably shouldnt be typing this"
seriously, google it, the tech is astounding...
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ok man, just live in ignorance.
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whatever makes you feel better
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Alternatively (Score:2)
Why is deletion the only option? (Score:5, Insightful)
If twitch gets a DMCA complaint they should IMHO stop serving the audio track of the video, but they should not delete the files or ask the creator to delete them.
Twitch should pay someone to create a tool to remove the audio of the song from the video. This involves the following steps:
1. correlating the song and the video to find the exact position (can be aided by the creator)
2. estimating how the song was impacted by the streamer's audio setup (i,e, estimating the impulse response)
3. transforming the song with the impulse response and subtracting it from the video (like the noise reduction tool in Audacity, but with varying "noise")
Until this tool is available creators should be given a simpler tool to mute the section of the video that contains the song mentioned in the complaint.
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They already did that. (Score:2)
Twitch already muted portions of the recordings and displayed message "Audio for portions of this video has been muted as it appears to contain copyrighted material owned or controlled by a third pary".
It seems as if they are trying to tackle the live streams now, too.
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The only did this for VODs though, not clips. The DMCA takedownsa re coming from clips where they didn't do this. This is the biggest issue where Twitch has simply failed. They did the bare minimum to protect their users and nothing more and are now paying the price. There is no reason they couldn't have done this same thing for clips, but they just didn't bother. Add to this their policy of permanently banning users after 3 DMCA notices and they really screwed everyone here tot he point their platform coul
Venue License (Score:2)
Memory and intelligence serving...
DJs can play any music at clubs, apparently because the clubs secure the necessary license (which is like the license that radio stations need).
Mixcloud is similar.
The only limit (at least at Mixcloud) is no more than two songs from the same artist can be played within a single DJ session.
Mixcloud (like radio stations) requires filling out a playlist form, but I do not know about DJs at clubs (although it would not surprise me, if a playlist must be formally submitted there
Things That Make You Go Hmmmm.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Things That Make You Go H.m.m.m.m...
Careful not to trigger twitchy content ID systems with your mouth sounds.
Also apparently your subject "looks like ascii art", but my modifications are perfectly acceptable. Hmmm indeed. Great job with those filters, folks.
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Hmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmnm-mmmm-mmmm -mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mrnmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mnmm-mmmm-mmmm-mnmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmmcomment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.-comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.mmnm-mmmm-rnmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mrnmm-nmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mrnmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmrnm-mmmm-mnmm??
The filter gestures were either a incompetent failures or filter theater. Not sure who they'd be trying to convince that they "did something". Superiors at dice? Shareholders? Surely not us.
Whatever the case, I remain embarrassed on their behalf. It is not particularly difficult to write filters, unless (as I suspect) you don't have anyone on staff who knows bugger-all about the programming language your software is written in (presumably Perl).
Simple solution (Score:2)
Stick to using classical music in the public domain for your Twitch tracks.
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Stick to using classical music in the public domain for your Twitch tracks.
The problem is not music they are playing over the top of the gameplay in many cases, although there is some cases from issues with them having radio/spotify etc on in background. The rest are a problem from music that is part of the game. Also they've been known to strike against CC licence works used correctly, or stuff where artist holds the rights to distribute etc. I mention the latter as some artists got strikes for playing on stuff on other platforms BUT the record label owns the rights to distribute
Stop licensing it.. (Score:2)
RIdiculous enough ? (Score:3)
Steps in the RIAA on the ridiculous is our game show.
Please take a seat , the show's already begun. every now and then the RIAA pretending to work for us content creators
step in and does something silly or against our best interest. Prince understood that ages ago. Go to his concert and the CD of the show was given at the door. Money's thin in the record inddustry for the creators , the bulk never goes to the creator but to the execs of the RIAA and the industry.
Well no more , we don't need the RIAA because the RIAA is essential only to the RIAA and the " industry " .. BULLSHIT
As content creators we got ways to xsell and distribute our content other than them. They have realised we dont need them anymore and
now they are thundering that they are the law , they are essential , they protect the creators etc etc
We can put our tracks where we want to now. Digital is a blessing. Youtube twitch and the rest by making the content available is doing us a favor : exposure and free publicity. The RIAA is against us doing what we want with out content even if we have no contracts with them. That is unreasonable.
IF we want twitch and you tube to show our content for free it's our decision , not theirs. We should be able to do what we want with our content without them interfering but they are interfering. RESIST the RIAA is screwint=g artists from all over the world and it's time to get rid of them any which way can be done.
Sing 'Happy Birthday' on Twitch, get DMCA'd (Score:2)
I suggest everyone who uses Twitch go sing Happy Birthday on it, just to make a point. That's how ridiculous this is.