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Comment by zorr | Hacker News Reader

Any service that broadcasts licensed music to users is going to have issues like this someday. See how tricky it is to have legal background music on a Twitch stream.

I think the best way forward for this kind of thing is to not broadcast the music but instead have each user use their own local player with their personal Spotify/YouTube account and sync the playlist through a shared service.

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Metallica played BlizzCon and the stream on Twitch had their audio replaced / covered up by elevator music [1]

[1] https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/9529030/twitch-metal...

Similarly Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park) and Herman Li (Dragonforce) ran into trouble performing their own music on Twitch during the pandemic. While in Li's case, it's possible that he didn't consult other rightsholders, Mike Shinoda mentioned that rights for Linkin Park music are held by a small number of people (possibly just the band?) and he offered Twitch that he could provide explicit consent from those people if they could exempt his channel from DMCA enforcement of LP music - twitch replied they simply didn't have a system in place that could handle that.

> Similarly Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park) and Herman Li (Dragonforce) ran into trouble performing their own music on Twitch during the pandemic

My god we live in a strange world.

Not in this case. It’s incorrect to call that they “own” the music if they don’t own the rights to it anymore because they sold the rights to someone else in exchange for money.

One can make a great painting and then sell the painting and the right to make copies of the painting to someone else. In this case, they would not be able to redraw that painting anymore than anyone else can.

As the rest of the comment says: "Mike Shinoda mentioned that rights for Linkin Park music are held by a small number of people (possibly just the band?) and he offered Twitch that he could provide explicit consent from those people if they could exempt his channel from DMCA enforcement of LP music"

Just because a creator can sell the rights does not automatically mean that every creator has. Let's assume good faith on the part of someone as proud of their work (and deservedly so) as Mike Shinoda.

And the creator may retain their right to distribute, perform etc.

We've even see law enforcement blast copyrighted music to prevent video from ending up online. I think you're right, the ability to synchronize clients via playlist versus streaming is going to be the path forward.

I'd love to see the copyrights holders go after law enforcement officer for unauthorized public performance of their songs. If a business owner has to pay a license to play music in their shop, or a DJ needs licenses to play a wedding, LEOs should not get a free pass to play copyrighted music in public.

The best way forward would be to abolish copyright. The only people making serious money in the current system are a fraction of a percent of the most popular artists and a constellation of middlemen who skim money off the top. And as sibling comments point out, the status quo is actually harmful to artists who want to play their music online.

Discord has spotify integration so you can have group listening sessions, but it only works for premium users.

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