This led to the current situation, which is understandably frustrating and worrying for many of you. Under these extraordinary circumstances, we recognized creators should have a reasonable chance to understand that content created in the past was being targeted as allegedly infringing and be given an opportunity to change their approach to music use before they got hit with strikes. This showed our commitment to upholding our obligations under the DMCA, while affording us the opportunity to sort out the best way to handle issuing strikes in these circumstances.
Because of this, we were compelled to delete the VODs and Clips that were identified in the notifications. The point of the DMCA is to strike a balance between the interests of rights holders (the major record labels in this case) and creators. What we found is that more than 99% of the notifications were for tracks that streamers were playing in the background of their stream. We have analyzed the notifications we received during that period from the end of May through the middle of October. Therefore, we also paused the processing of strikes associated with these batched notifications in order to give you the tools, information, and time that you would need to deal with them. So, while we continued to remove content targeted by these notifications as required by the DMCA, we understood VODs and Clips from years ago may not necessarily reflect your current approach to music. We also realized that we needed to provide streamers with more educational programs and content management tools to help you deal with this unprecedented number of notifications coming in all at once. We were as surprised by this sudden avalanche of notifications as many of you were. This means two things: 1) if you play recorded music on your stream, you need to stop doing that and 2) 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. We continue to receive large batches of notifications, and we don’t expect that to slow down. 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. How did we get to this moment? Until May of this year, streamers received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications each year on Twitch. As a company that is built around a community of people who create content, we take allegations of copyright infringement seriously. This policy is important because we respect the rights of all creators, including those who create or record music, as well as the rights of those who own and control copyrights. This includes removing the content, sharing the details with the channel owner, and tracking the allegation.ĭMCA takedown notifications can affect your ability to stream because we, as part of our efforts to comply with the DMCA and similar global laws, issue and track copyright strikes and ban the accounts of those who repeatedly infringe the copyrights of others. When we receive a DMCA notification, we process the notification in accordance with our DMCA Guidelines. Part of complying means that when a copyright holder thinks a streamer has used their content without permission, we have a process in place for them to be able to request the content be taken down. We comply with the DMCA and similar laws worldwide. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) is a set of US laws that allows you to create and share content on digital service providers like Twitch. DMCA and Twitchįirst off, a quick review of what DMCA actually is.
We’ll do our best to keep the legalese to a minimum, though there’s bound to be technical terms here and there. Moving forward, we’ll be more transparent with what’s happening and what tools and resources we’re building to help.Ĭopyright law and the DMCA are not small or simple topics, so this won’t be a brief post. Things can–and should–be better for creators than they have been recently, and this post outlines our next steps to get there. Your frustration and confusion with recent music-related copyright issues is completely justified.
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