Recent issues with copyrights and streaming games?

Hey guys, I am in law school and currently taking a Copyright law class where we have to each give a presentation. I picked the streaming game category to talk about because duh, that's what I know best!

I know in the past few months they had discussed things on the Bombcast that would fit into this, I just don't know which episodes, and I figure I'll just ask here and see if anyone knows offhand. I think I remember some issue with Nintendo stopping people from streaming Smash for some reason. I'm just at the very beginning of researching this thing, reading some law review articles on the history of games and copyright. I think she wants me to focus specifically on whether streamers can consider what they do copyrightable, because the court still has not come to a decision on this.

The topic has been sort of a recurring theme throughout the history of LPs/streaming, but more recent issues are largely less about "is it breaking copyright to stream a game" and more about copyright issues around streams (Twitch has been cracking down hard on music infringement, even stuff that appears in games/sometimes is supposedly not copyrighted, Nintendo's thing was because a tournament wanted to use mods so online for Melee was actually feasible.)

For stuff specifically relating to games, I know a number of games have given explicit permission for streamers (I want to say Minecraft is a prominent example of this, but Im not sure), and a lot of the more long-standing arguments I remember about where the line gets drawn tend to be around more "linear" titles like Telltale's games, and I seem to remember Firewatch and later That Dragon Cancer causing a bit of a discussion as well.

Most devs/publishers, but certainly not all, generally see it as great word-of-mouth promotion/advertisement, I think. A lot specifically go out of their way to encourage it, with games like Noita including game-ified mechanics for streamers to engage with their audience via, and games like Fortnite and Cyberpunk 2077 specifically including streamer-friendly modes with blank out certain details unfit for streaming (ie: copyrighted music, certain identifying details, I would imagine Cyberpunk's filters nudity as well.)

Well if you want a good example of a publisher/developer that is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the streamer friendly devs, look no further than Atlus with the Persona games, I believe 5 was practically un-streamable with all the restrictions they required(I think for Strikers the US side has loosened but Japan hasn't, leaving how safe it is to stream kind of up in the air).

Thank you guys so much for that! That's giving me some good ideas to focus on.

Streaming entire playthroughs of games must be super weird from a legal standpoint. Like, no one seems to be exactly sure where the line is but many big publishers (Microsoft, Ubisoft, and Sony) strongly encourage it while some others (Capcom, Nintendo, Atlus, or maybe that was Sega) place some pretty weird restrictions on it.

It's totally fair to stream something like Minecraft or Rainbow Six Siege, where every person is going to have a unique, individual experience, but for a super-linear story-thing that can be finished in a few hours (Firewatch was a big one here) it's kind of a shitty thing to do because a lot of people will just watch the stream, get everything they need from watching that stream, and not pay a dime for the game. How do you separate the two in a court of law? They're not two entirely different things, they both fall under the umbrella term "video game", but there are clear reasons why streaming one kind of game for a hundred hours is A-OK while streaming another for the four hours it takes to finish it is very definitely not. Is there a clear line separating what can be streamed and what can't?

Probably not, but it's worth thinking about. I don't think streaming is going away anytime soon, though - Microsoft and Sony consoles have built-in tools specifically for streaming and Sony even dedicated a button to sharing video game experiences. Nvidia has Shadowplay, but even without that a combination of OBS and a decent internet connection ensures that Let's Plays and streaming of PC games will probably always be a thing even if every publisher somehow turns against it.