There is a big movement on streaming lately and it’s not one that many streamers are fond of. As you likely are aware, Twitch recently had made some big changes to the content streamers are allowed to use. Or in better terms, the content they are not allowed to use. Just like with YouTube, DMCA is becoming a major issue on Twitch with the last headline breaking moment happening in October of this year. If you frequent Twitch or stream, then you have at least seen this problem pop up quite a bit this year.
DMCA for copyright music is not uncommon at all. For YouTube, there is a series of bots and manually takedown requests when music is caught being used. In fact, there’s no real workaround unless you opt to enjoy copyright free music. However, DMCA wasn’t much of a problem for Twitch streaming in the past. Streamers could log online, play some games and talk with their community without any issue of what’s being played in the background. After all, how many times have you jumped onto a channel to find that the streamer is enjoying some music off of Spotify?
At any rate, these DMCA notices came in by the thousands suddenly for Twitch which forced them to do a quick takedown across all the targeted clips. This was done without any alerts for streamers so content new and old were being removed automatically by Twitch. As you can imagine, some streamers were upset over the loss of content and the lack of any notice or means to remove the targeted content.
Now Twitch has made an update online that talks about DMCA and their apologies for the sudden rush of removing clips. Overall, the post once again alerts streamers to avoid using any copyrighted music material which is easier said than done. Streamers are still thoroughly enjoying some light music in the background as they play their games, create content, or simply hang out with some online friends.
In the future, there is likely going to be some new tools provided by Twitch to better eliminate some content that was targeted by DMCA. Furthermore, we may see new alerts going to streamers over the content targeted with means of how to dispute the claim if warranted. At the end of the day, it looks like DMCA notices are still going to be a problem for Twitch which may be a massive problem for some streamers.