Twitch Music And Copyright Laws

The community that uses the Twitch platform to perform live broadcasts was taken by surprise with the news that they would have to delete their videos that contained copyrighted music. After thousands of streamers expressed their dissatisfaction with the situation on social media, Twitch finally explained that the action was due to a huge request from record labels that do not want to see their artists’ songs being used without authorization.

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The label side

In the United States, the country where Twitch is headquartered, there is a copyright law called DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which considers anyone who uses any production without authorization from the author to be an infraction. That goes, among other things, for music.

The control of who uses a song or not with or without authorization is very difficult supervision to be done since the internet allows the easy sharing of songs. Twitch also follows the DMCA guidelines, but again, it was difficult to do general control of each video posted on the platform.

And that’s where the record companies came in. They have a huge structure to search for this type of content that violates the DMCA and soon found thousands of videos on Twitch with background music, editions, etc. According to the platform, requests to remove content are from 2017 to 2019, so you can imagine the number of things that will simply disappear from there.

The streamers side

Thousands of Twitch content producers are receiving emails informing them that one or more of their videos have violated the DMCA and have therefore been removed.

Although the platform’s guidelines have always prohibited the reproduction of music without authorization, the vast majority of streamers use music during their broadcasts. There, the user has only two options: wait for Twitch to remove its content, which may even lead to a ban on the account, or else delete all videos containing unauthorized music on their own.

The community’s reaction is being mixed over the situation, even though they already know that these rules existed. In addition to game streamers, DJ Zegon, from the duo Tropkillaz, commented that the attitude of record labels affects other professions, such as musicians who have also used Twitch to promote their work.

To try to help the crowd, many musicians went to social media to defend that their songs be released for broadcasts, such as Christian Liu and Dudu MC.

To avoid an account ban, Twitch recommends that all content producers on the platform who have used music in their videos delete the clips if they are unsure whether or not they can use that production. The alternative, from now on, is to look for music platforms that offer the purchase of copyrights or that have music options released for general use.

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September 5, 2020

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