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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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