Twitch Implements Controversial New Policy Changes

Remember when all those people left YouTube forever ?

Anyway is it fair use when your using the music in the background while making money from the video? No.

What I will say is that a lot of laws weren't really written with the internet in mind and maybe it's time to go back and figure that stuff out.

This automated system would work great.... if there were no such thing as video games with licensed music in them.

@whitegreyblack: yup. And because you didn't pay for those rights when your monetizing them you don't get to use them. same reason why when Conan plays games I his show he often has to turn off the music (like in wwe and gta etc)

Just playing devils advocate here.

Friend of mine had his No More Heroes stream muted because of the music the game itself plays.

Good job, Twitch.

@darkstalker: You're not wrong. But man, it would be nice to see at least a few of our archaic systems catch up to 'the way we live now'. (Although look at what the DMCA, a piece of legislation specifically meant to do exactly that, has ended up doing/becoming)

I am not saying you're out of order, I'm saying the whole damn system is out of order. :-)

Come on, that is not the same. The audience for Twitch is going to be much more inclined to move on to the Next Big Thing more than everyone's aunts and uncles who used Youtube to post a video of the family picnic and getting it muted because a Neil Young song is overdubbed on it.

I'll go with you on the "using music in the background while making money" thing - I mean, not in principle because who the fuck really is hurt by some girl playing dubstep in the background between Counter-Strike matches getting occasional 20 dollar donations because guys think she'll take her top off for them, but from a Fear Me, I Am Super Lawyer point of view I totally get it.

@whitegreyblack: won't get an argument from me. Online media was never considered when copyright law came into effect. Which is why I don't really blame twitch for trying to stop lawsuits that give a huge advantage to the rights holder.

I do think once money start switching hands the fair use argument is no longer valid.

@kanerobot: it was more of a joke. For the most part at least.

The big thing is that a lot of of the people who are making a living from streams it's not as easy to just. Go to the next thing. There is no garunteed their fanbase will follow. When the YouTube stuff started a lot of big youtubers created their own websites but they all came back when their fanbases didn't follow. This is because a lot of their fanbases were those aunts and uncles who were causal users.

Will a lot of the speed runners and people doing it for fun not come back? No doubt.

C'mon, if you're going to enforce it. ENFORCE it. This is the most Billy Joel you can have - for FREE and nobody's stopping it. Copyright laws with regards to the internet are an inconsistent shambles.

Something to consider during this discussion is games that contain licensed music such as Saints Row IV or Watch_Dogs. I played Watch_Dogs live on Twitch the night it came out for a bit just to try it out, and then uploaded the video to youtube after the fact so that it would be archived on my youtube account as well. Youtube immediately flagged the video for 20 seconds of Alice Cooper when I had the nerve to check out the music option in the phone. With Twitch implementing a similar system it will be hard for a lot of these open world games to get streamed without half of the archive being muted.

Hell, Audiosurf 2 is now a heck of a lot more interesting streaming choice at least!

I see copyright holders as that jerk kid on the playground that would hog all of the toys and not let anyone else play with them because they have issues with sharing.

Twitch and Google are the enabling parents that can't control their child.

I'm surprised more people aren't freaking out about the "60 day maximum" thing. The ridiculously indiscriminate auto-muting will wreck things in the meantime, but the time limit will be the true nail in the coffin. Could you imagine if Youtube automatically deleted every video after 15 to 60 days? Literally all you're doing is guaranteeing that people will keep their archives hosted somewhere else, which means you will get no traffic for anything which isn't being actively livestreamed.

And of course, once the content producer's archives are on a different service, it's a short step to that service looking at doing the livestreaming itself...

That seems to be what they want. They want people to archive on Youtube probably. You're right though. It's terrible for the service and a huge change.

I guess the real catalyst for all these copyright policies was when people went from sharing video gameplay videos online for free, to trying to monetize it and make money off of it (although this fight may have come eventually to the surface even if money was not changing hands? Maybe...).

The weird thing about it is, it's not like the RIAA was actually losing money on people monetizing YouTube/Twitch video gameplay videos. Folks streaming video games on Twitch/YouTube are not using the music itself as the selling feature, nor were they monetizing it in a way that competes with whatever method the music artists/publishers themselves can market themselves and monetize their own efforts.

The deletion of the Twitch streams is pretty frustrating to completionists like us, but I guess after 1-2 weeks, the people who would watch an archive of a stream was comparitively infinitesimal....

....then again that is measured against the batshit Live viewer numbers that some streams pull in daily

Obviously the way to make money with a Content ID system would be to procedurally show a listing for the track being played and offer links to a store where you can purchase the song legally.

Blocking a 1/2 hour of other audio just because the game you were playing has a licensed track or the composer released an OST album is just a job security measure for the lawyers.

I sure hope those who did the archives for the Games Done Quick streams makes them into highlights so they are saved forever, i love just blowing an afternoon waching some of those. While i dont stream or watch streams that often these policy changes seem abysmal, this seems like a great oppritunity for another service to start coming into its own.

@thebunnyhunter:

I can say after some testing that Hitbox.tv is pretty great and works easily with OBS. If someone is already using xstream or OBS on twitch they already have all the knowledge they need to stream on hitbox. Also I found I could go a bit higher on the quality side without connection issues than I can with twitch, but that might just be the luck of the draw.

I don't know why people are acting surprised. This is how it works: When something becomes very popular, the corporate heads take it over and ruin it's nature charm and turn it into a soulless cash flowing machine. Twitch is the latest example of hundreds of them.

Well I guess any hope I ever had of finding Dan and the GameInformers crew 11 hour livestream of Ride to Hell is about to die ;_;

@patrickklepek From their AMA. Yep this is pretty much a joke to them.

@alucitary: to be fair to them it was a troll question so they gave a troll answer.

Also that AMA was never gonna go well anyway. Have you see reddit during AMAs of controversial topics? It gets bad fast.

@darkstalker: Ya, that would make since if this was a PM to them or something, but this is a public forum on the front page of Reddit. They didn't have to answer the question at all, and their casual demeanor and bad sense of humor is reflecting pretty poorly on their current state of mind with regards to their content creators and users.

Beginning of the end.

@alucitary: yea if it was me I would have just ignored it. I don't think anything would really help the internet from hating them right now but probably doesn't help.

Reading the AMA and there are some decent answers though they are vague at times.

Some things from the AMA as I'm reading it:

They seem to be saying the in game music blocking is not supposed to happen and they are working on it. Seems to mostly be talking about original stuff though.They seem to mostly be trying to stop the playing music while playing games crowd which is understandable.

They said making the changes quickly was a mistake.

They made it clear a million times they will not be doing the same thing for chat or live video.

@darkstalker: also "no audio content ID matching on live video"... no one believes him and it gets troll replies... oh well

@darkstalker: the problem is that the in game music point completely contradicts what they stated in the announcement blog. Aside from that most of the other answers are generally regurgitating information we already know, which is fine, but I was hoping that this AMA would provide some clarification on points that seem pretty simple such as the usage plans for the petabytes of storage that are being freed up for no discernible reason at this point.

hitbox.tv will get so much traffic because of this.

I'm not picking sides from the last post just posting it for people here as responses are getting downvoted and therefor hard to find.

I can certainly understand why people would be weary of responses considering the changes. There really isn't any way to tell either way so I don't think troll replies are the answer. But it's all because of frustration so I get it.

ya, this is definitely mostly bad timing on their part. If they had just spaced these announcements out further then there would have been far less backlash, and it would have been much easier to fix any potential issues/ use cases.

www.hitbox.tv

@darkstalker: I have to disagree. I think troll replies are extremely effective and important when things like this happen. As long as they're clever.

I can't read the AMA where I am right now. Did Twitch confirm that they sold out to Google?

Is your stream muted when you play a game with licensed music like GTA?

@spraynardtatum: I go on reddit to laugh so whatever.

They made it clear the one thing they won't talk about is acquisition rumors.

@follow001: that seems to be the case. They stated original in game music shouldn't be muted.

@follow001: As of now yes http://www.twitch.tv/adam_ak/b/555134005

@alucitary: Woah. Twitch really said that? That makes me lose a ton of respect for them.

They did. It was really stupid for them to say it, but that question actually has an underlining meaning that many do not know about.

They're pointing out that it's a loaded question that presupposes facts. Try answering "are you still beating your wife?" with a yes/no answer.

e:f;b

My main problem with these automated ContentID matching measures is that neither the copyright owners nor the platform holders have to do anything while the content creators are tasked with filing individual disputes over these automated claims. If a multi-million dollar company feels like they lose money over a song being played on a stream, the onus should be on them to issue a copyright claim, not just automatically flag anything ever and make the little guy prove their claims are baseless. And of course, Twitch or Youtube don't have to do shit either as they get their ad revenue regardless, until users start migrating to other services.

@benderunit22: when someone is making a tv show people have to make sure they are not using someone else's copyrighted material. They do it because lawsuits are expensive and it's up to them to make sure they are not using someone else content without permission.

Playing a song in a random video for your friends is one thing but twitch is a company working with partners to make a profit. And now that they are getting bigger they have to be a bit more careful because it's when a company starts making money that others try to find ways to exploit that.

It sucks and I don't know if an automated system is best personally but I understand.

Whatever happened to content being incidental? Fair use? Not to mention, it is impossible to police so broadly like this. You can not determine between my using content without permission and with permission -- as demonstrated by the countless times google has killed youtube channels and videos that are the owners and originators of content that other people improperly claim ownership of.

Worst of all is that, like with the rest of their youtube DMCA polices, this automation and lack of personal interaction and ability to respond to a human tends to undermine and circumvent the DMCA, itself. If you claim ownership of content I am using, improperly as per your statement, then you can file a DMCA and I can counter it, requiring the information be immediately re-instated. If you are making false claims, I can seek recompense for your behavior in court.

With most of the Youtube process (traditionally, at least), they take your word for it and penalize me. Period. No exceptions. No counter-claim. No day in court. No penalty for misbehavior by alleged copyright owners. It is the worst of all worlds. Even with Youtube's more recent changes, you do not have the full protection of the DMCA process.

On the other hand, at least there are viable alternatives to Youtube and Twitch. Like... Uh... Like...

@shindig: Don't wish for stuff that's already happening...

That whole "world wide web" thing started out as something really cool, too bad we are already living in the age of the "regional locked web", due to copyright shenanigans. Kind of ironic that as a German you can use Chinese proxies and still end up with an "less censored Internet" :/

Btw I'm expecting similar results for a lot of Twitch content once that Google acquisition goes over, basically rendering Twitch useless for many German users, unless those users are using a non-German proxy to watch stuff on Twitch.

Issue being that streaming HD videos is something rather traffic and bandwidth intensive, so people will be forced to pay for premium proxies if the still want to enjoy their Twitch entertainment.

I'm still getting Billy Joel. Rule Britannia. This is going to ruin GDQ 2015. Its such a dumb thing to punish, too. Its like raiding a coffee shop because they've got the top 40 running in the background. Nobody's here for the music. For twitch to successfully argue this would require a substantial number of people entering streams and replaying four minutes of footage just for Cheryl Cole's new bollocks.

Nobody would do that. Ever. It's already on youtube or grooveshark, spotify or whatever so sort your priorities out.

@darkstalker: One of the differences being that even if you had permission, for instance by licensing music for broadcast use, the system would still flag you regardless and you'd still have to go through the process of proving you had the rights to use it while all the other parties don't have to lift a finger.

@shindig: Actually Britannia has been one of the original culprits as to why we are in this mess in the first place. When Gutenberg invented his printing press, he basically invented the first mass media known to humanity.

Before that it had mostly been Churches who controlled the flow of information, due to their monopoly on having scribes copy books by hand. I also love how that part of the wiki article claims that no elaborate system of censorship existed, just to mention the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited books) by the pope, in the next sentence. Contradict much?

As a reaction to Gutenberg's press, Churches and Governments all over Europe instigated the idea of an "copyright" and "intellectual property", so they could still control the flow of information.

No this is not some dumb conspiracy theory (i actually wish it would be), it's the actual history of "copyright", even tho it's been heavily muddled over these past centuries.

It's like humanity really wants to fuck up everything good.. every time we discover something amazing new, that could change the whole world for the better, we purposefully sabotage it so a selected few can keep on profiting. Instead of changing or removing obsolete copyright and IP laws, we are trying to change the Internet to abide by them...

Wait, are you saying that in this pseudo-capitalist society that we've all basically resigned ourselves to, the individual assumes massive personal liability while corporations employ everything at their legal disposal to shield themselves from that same liability, at the same time retaining most of the same rights as an individual with none of the downsides?

Weird!

Fucking terms and conditions....