Twitch streamers report DMCA takedowns for in-game sound effects | Hacker News Reader

Twitch streamers report DMCA takedowns for in-game sound effects

gamesindustry.biz

92 pointsnitinreddy8839 comments

Putting aside how horrible DMCA is in general, the article is specifically about invalid takedown requests for completely unrelated content. This is just ridiculous, and won't stop until there's real consequences for filing invalid requests. As far as I know, there's currently no penalty whatsoever for it, which allows these companies to just open the flood gates and spray in every direction with zero fucks given about destroying people's livelihood.

I'm curious if there's any possibility for a counter-lawsuit against these companies for mass filing invalid DMCA requests. Maybe once they get burned a few times they'll at least try to be smarter about how they file them?

Misleading title as those are not actual DMCA takedowns.

Twitch uses audiblemagic to scan all saved VODs of streams for music and mutes anything it finds specifically to prevent streamers from getting DMCAd. Those are not DMCA notices sent by any copyright holder, that is just Twitch's internal system muting anything they think might be music. Lots of streamers then incorrectly end up calling those automutes being "DMCAd" on stream and Twitter.

You can tell by all the screenshots being of Twitch's VOD manager page that shows streamers what got muted. Notices about actual DMCAs on the other hand are only sent to the streamer via email and don't show anywhere on Twitch currently. Lots of people confusing those two including some news orgs.

RIAA and the music industry are hitting Twitch very hard right now with massive waves of takedowns mostly for people just plainly playing music on stream but also the occasional claim for ingame music made specifically for the game or things like people doing outdoor streams and walking by some music playing randomly in the background in a store somewhere but there's also a ton of misinformation being spread by people completely misunderstanding basic things about both how Twitch and copyright law work unfortunately. It's quite a mess.

Are you sure about that one? AFAIK Twitch's use of AudibleMagic has existed for years, and they only mute audio in vods when detected. Did that change? These on the other hand have had creator actually banned after 3 instances, which sound much more in-line with DMCA than auto-detection which Twitch runs.

> which sound much more in-line with DMCA

Really? DMCA has no "three srikes" that I'm aware of.

It's Twitch policy

DMCA doesn't explicitly mention "3 strikes", but it does have a "Repeat Infringer" clause saying people who have multiple infractions need to be dealt with. In that sense, I don't think Twitch can legally allow an unlimited number of cases go by without banning.

Pretty sure. The article links four tweets three of which have screenshots all showing only the twitch muted VOD section.

The author of the first linked tweet even corrected themselves a day later in a reply to the original tweet.

>Thank you for all the reply’s and feedback! Im now understand that this isn’t a DMCA takedown but just your everyday classic muted vod. https://twitter.com/YamiltonJay/status/1327669258776506368

The only tweet without a screenshot in the article that called it a "copyright claim" also switched to calling it "a muted section" in a separate tweet. https://twitter.com/SL128T/status/1326949595511926784

A lot of people have been getting actual DMCA notices and strikes and bans usually for music but so far all the claims about sound effects I've seen were just the VOD muting system. Could still be happening of course but given the links the article cites I'd call the article headline misleading.

Much like YouTube, there are false DMCA claims and takedowns as well. Counter claiming and appealing leads to a byzantine support hell that widely favors larger content corps, much like YouTube. But even in the case of false takedowns, your only recourse is the legal system, which is simply way to expensive to access for most Twitch steamers.

And good luck to you if you get three of them and a ban before you have a chance to respond and appeal. Or a DMCA claim on one of a million ancient clips, or even one that you already deleted.

Muting is one thing, and somewhat more acceptable. Losing your livelihood altogether is another.

It must be tough to work in an industry where your livelihood depends on an entity which you have no meaningful relationship with.

Amazon sellers, Youtube vloggers, Twitch streamers, Instagram dropshippers, etc etc. You can run those businesses on other platforms, like eBay and Vimeo, but they will almost certainly fail if you do.

But if you don't, you might wake up one morning without a business. Too stressful for me: maybe a start would be expecting contracts rather than EULAs for people who pay 3rd-parties to run a business on their platform.

My fathers friend owned a gas station in a small town that was on the route out of town to a large packing plant. One day the company was bought out by a larger competitor and within a few weeks the flow of trucks and employees dried up along the road. He went out of business about 6 months later.

This isn't a new thing, and we should stop pretending like the internet somehow invented parasitic businesses.

Why is that parasitic? If you provide a gas station and the truck drivers find it cost effective to refuel there, that sounds symbiotic?

Commensalism, I guess?

It is parasitic because of the power dynamic.

If you close business the truck drivers are largely unaffected. Vice versa and you are also out of business.

GP isn't talking about the relationship between the gas station and customers. They are talking about the relationship between the gas station and the business that acquired it.

Yeah basically "pro" users should be ruled as employees of the platform like Uber drivers.

In all this DMCA affair, I can't stop to think that Twitch is at fault here.

You had think Twitch would stand up for its streamer base, like organizing a massive class action, do some Prop 22's level thing, etc

It looks like Twitch is just relaying bogus DMCA requests to streamers, and let them take all responsibilities. No help to find which segment or vod.

Maybe I'm all wrong, but that looks like an even worse relationship that the standard "gig" economy known so far.

They are legally required to. It works the same way on YouTube. If you are a host you are legally required to immediately take the content down and forward the DMCA claim to the accused. The accused can then file a counter-claim and the content will be re-instated, after which the initial filing party may choose to not pursue or decide to take the accused to the court.

It's not quite the same. You are correct for DMCA claims, more or less, but the automated precursor step with muting by audiblemagic (or in the case of YouTube, contentid) is one under Twitch's control.

In the case of YouTube there's actual settlement rules they are trying to abide, but Twitch's clubbed approach is by their own volition. In both cases there is a clear impression that they are vastly valuing their relationship with larger content corps over their content creators and users.

Contesting invalid results from these automated systems requires appealing to the very same automated mega tech corp support hell and will more often than not end miserably. At best, you get a repeated copy paste from Twitch support twitter staff telling you to 'read the eula next time' (to avoid getting muted or banned for a public domain sound effect) because they've engineered a system and business model that is hostile to reasonable human intervention.

The overall situation is further complicated by the fact that Twitch has terrible tooling for dealing with clips, and instead of letting users just auto mute or auto takedown any clips that received a DMCA rather than striking them, they received... no options. So many users were left to crawl tens to hundreds of thousands of clips for potential violations of both an automagic black box and unknown future overzealous or malicious copyright claimers.

The only reasonable approach there was to just backup and then delete everything. But guess what? Deleting via the UI and API didn't guarantee a clip was actually deleted on Twitch's backend. And you could still face DMCA complaints, strikes from Twitch and other repercussions from content and things that happened years ago, with no recourse.

Overall, there are many things Twitch could have done to abide by both the letter and spirit of the law while also giving their content creators a way to handle things reasonably. Instead, they did effectively nothing for their users, and seem to have bent over backwards and sacrificed their users in order to appease external content rights holders above and beyond what was required by law. Much like YouTube does, but at least YouTube has prior legal fallout and trauma and the greater Alphabet user-hostile ideologies to justify their awful approaches.

I agree. While Twitch cannot prevent the initial DMCA takedown, they could offer assistance with the counter claim. If they do that often enough, sending fraudulent DMCA requests becomes expensive for the RIAA.

It makes more sense when you realize that Twitch is owned by Amazon, who is trying to break into the music streaming business via Amazon Music. The RIAA could make Amazon Music functionally cease to exist tomorrow, if they chose to pull their music licenses, so I suspect that plays a big part in why Twitch has suddenly become so accommodating to RIAA takedown requests.

Good. We need more understanding of how terrible the DMCA is. Please support EFF at https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca

My mind could be playing tricks on me but my sense is that there is a surge in DMCA takedown requests. Has anyone seen anything that might explain the trend?

It's not just you. In the last month:

- youtube-dl targeted by RIAA

- widevine decryption targeted by Google

- Google drops Google Play Music, which allowed custom uploads

- increase in Twitch takedowns

The RIAA seems to be emboldened. Google is singing to their tune, and now they're trying to get Amazon to do the same.

> Google drops Google Play Music, which allowed custom uploads

Google Play Music's successor, YouTube Music, also allows custom uploads.

Doesn't seem to work on older phones, I've had to make the jump to VLC.

Not well. They’re isolated in their own section of the app and don’t seamlessly integrate with included music like they did in Play Music.

On Twitch's point specifically, they claim:

> Until May of this year, streamers received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications each year on Twitch. 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.

Sounds like the marketers might smell money in the water with covid accelerating the amount of entertainment that people consume at home and online.

Without any functioning oversight bodies to look out for consumers' interests, why not unleash the sharks?

I think the RIAA is actually making Top40 music invisible to the internet. They will continue to blame the fall in revenue on piracy rather than their brain dead strategy of removing music from the Internet zeitgeist.

I hope this madness will go deeper until everyone will start screaming to how insane this is.

Yes. Take it all down. The system is working as intended, killing the Golden Goose. Now if someone would just create a playlist called DMCA-proof songs.... :)

There used to be something like this, the pod safe music network. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podsafe_Music_Network

Twitch already provide such a thing. https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2020/09/30/introducing-soundtrack-...

Except I have a friend who streams on regular basis and got his stream muted while playing songs from Twitch’s own streaming service. Wouldn’t recommend using that at the moment.

Alternatively, is there a way to license music for streaming on twitch?

At least for professional streamers, that would make sense and it could align their goals with those of the music industry.

pretzel.rocks is a great company doing just this for streamers, I have no stake in the business I just know the founders and they're great people who truly care about content creators and musicians alike.

Now there is even more precarious position to already sane of YouTube artists. This is precisely kind of fear that will kill the platform.

Their prime new corporate-backed competition, Mixer, got killed earlier this year. So they're quite emboldened to sacrifice users in their ambitions now. Where are they going to go? YouTube? Random audience-less zero revenue platforms?

Youtube streaming is in many ways bigger than twitch. It has way more concurrent viewers, and the top channels are usually bigger. But there’s no discoverability. You can’t really move there or start there to build an audience.

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