“Twitch Streamers have to delete their life’s work”: The Twitch-DMCA crackdown explained

Twitch is the hotbed of controversy recently with its legal battle with Apple. The latest being the DMCA crackdown that has left twitch streamers in the lurch.

Twitch is always in the news for its policies with many saying that the streaming site is arbitrary in certain aspects. This time the issue is music copyrights. It started back in July when Twitch sent an email to many streamers.

This created panic and confusion. Lets take a look at what the issue really is and why its such a cause for concern.

Understanding the DMCA act –

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is an act which controls how copyrighted material is used online.  One way of avoiding the DMCA act is to remove any content that crosses the guidelines.

Any form of music is more often  copyrighted. Playing the same without proper permissions leads to a mess of violations and legal battles. It is also common place for streamers to play music when they are live.

Twitch streamers face the DMCA crackdown –

In July, Twitch started sending emails to hundreds of streamers asking them to take down their content that violates the guidelines. Twitch drew a lot of flak for the way it handled the situation. There was no proper way of finding out if your content violates the guidelines.

Some streamers even said that there was no way for them to challenge the copyright or counterclaim it. Twitch Support tweeted that, “going forward, clips that are identified as having copyrighted music will be deleted without penalty to help ensure you do not receive DMCA notifications from rights holders.” More confusion arose from this.

Thousands of video clips and content deleted –

Streamers thought that the best way to act is to delete all their old content. Dr. Lupo deleted around 600,000 clips while Timthetatman deleted 200,00 old clips. xQc was not far behind as he deleted “Terabytes of old clips” and strongly criticized the whole issue. Many streamers even labelled the move as “destroying their life’s work.”

From banning streamers to copyright issues, one thing is for certain Twitch remains a hotbed for controversy.

the Twitch DMCA bloodbath has begun, as hundreds of partnered streamers have received emails from Twitch as DMCA takedown notifications pic.twitter.com/zoIoI7Q7Xp

— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) October 20, 2020