Twitch has become a lifeline for many streamers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular club and mobile DJs whose only source of income has been cut off in recent months. Therefore, it is essential that streaming services like Twitch remain a viable outlet for music users, while providing fair compensation to songwriters, recording artists, and record labels.

Unfortunately, U.S. copyright law is still vastly out of touch within the marketplace for independent DJs, many of whom make little or no income from their online broadcasts. This certainly presents a unique challenge in the case of Twitch. DJs either run the risk of DCMA takedown notices from rightsholders or else they must clear all the nececssary performance rights themselves.

Needless to say, negotiating individual licenses can be extremely costly and time-consuming even with a team of lawyers. And that doesn't guarantee that the rights in all musical works and sound recordings both domestic and foreign will be cleared for use, particularly in the case of unsigned artists and record labels with a much smaller catalog.

The current statutory license, administered by SoundExchange, is also cost prohibitive at $500 minimum annual fee per channel. For a streaming service like Twitch where the predominant content is not music, that is hardly a viable alternative to securing individual licensing from rightsholders. Of course, it's also questionable whether existing copyright law even accounts for the interactive multimedia nature of a streaming service like Twitch, with animated video overlays, live camera feeds, etc.

Therefore, I propose a two-fold solution:

a) We need a one-stop licensing collective for independent online DJs to efficiently and economically secure the performance rights in sound recordings. This is something I'd long been interested in pursuing under the moniker of "Bitwax". Now more than ever I believe this may prove vital to the interests of recording artists, so many of whom are losing a significant revenue stream from lack of in-person concerts.

b) We must work diligently with lawmakers and the RIAA to introduce a statutory license specially catering to independent DJs for their limited commercial use of sound recordings in online broadcasts, including a reasonable royalty rate and recordkeeping requirements. This could be expanded with a secondary licensing tier to accommodate live streaming of video games, in which the music serves only as an ancillary component of the broadcast.

In 2006, I launched the Small Webcaster Community Initiative, in which I helped to lobby for the interests of small commercial Webcasters in association of SaveNetRadio and other industry partners under CARP. In light of these recent events, however, I am thinking it would be well worth reviving that coalition as an industry trade group, not only to protect the interests of streaming services like Twitch but also to finally give independent DJs (and gamers) a viable means in which to support the musicians that they know and love.

Leslie Krause
www.smallwebcaster.org

With the wave of mass-deletion we have found that the methods for reviewing DMCA claims and taking appropriate action has been like trying to change a light bulb with no hands.

I propose:

Since all deleted content is held in archives, it should become viewable to only the streamer who can selectively re-publish content that does not have DMCA strikes. Furthermore, they can take action to mute content, appeal or delete the content totally.

Any content with a DMCA strike goes into the "hidden" directory that the creator can access. They will then have some options for how to handle it. The portions of video with DMCA strikes will be highlighted but can be adjusted and sent for review. This is to combat the auto-mute system from over-muting a video.

From this dashboard, a creator can either upload their license and documentation or send an appeal with reasoning.

I also suggest that Twitch add the name of the rightsholder and the song/sound. That way a user can fact check on their own end and make an informed appeal if necessary.

Twitch should also make available a list of games that are frequently DMCA'd due to their in-game soundtrack. Some companies care and others don't. We'd like to know beforehand which games to spend money and time on.

Hi,

My ideas are as follows and some probably already mentioned.

Firstly - I do acknowledge that playing copyrighted music is a risk taken on when it is played, whether it's in-game or nightbot/itunes/spotify or other media player.

In the past, VODs were muted with a red bar on the bottom of VODs to show where copyright-flagged audio was detected.
I would advise going back to this and adding some sort of mouse-over tag so we can see what track/s were flagged and by whom so that it can be contested if necessary to ensure no abuse of the DMCA system.
Twitch auto-deleting content is ill-advised as streamers have literally no comeback in the event a false claim is issued.
Some sort of manual review process for DMCA claims where action against a Twitch channel may be required so streamers have some sort of opportunity to defend themselves. They are your community afterall, at least enable them instead of sweeping the problem under the rug by deleting stuff or whipping out channel bans because there is inconsistency with this.

Lastly - Holding streamers responsible for copyrighted content on already deleted VODs shouldn't be a thing since they no longer have control over them. It seems that VODs are stored on Twitch's server even after deleted by the streamer so some sort of protection here would be nice, or at least lock if off from external review if you NEED to keep VODs beyond their deletion period for legal reasons.

Lastly part 2 - I do agree that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does need a review to adapter and modernize how we listen and share music in this highly digital age.
I'm no legal expert so I don't have any suggestions on this, nor is this Twitch's issue specifically but I think it is a shared sentiment and hopefully one we can look forward to being worked on to prevent such take-down storms from happening in the future.

The fact that copyright holders are sending DMCA strikes for people who are listening to music during their stream is absurd. It's commercially absurd. It's ethically absurd and its practically absurd.

First of all the behaviour by publishers is completely against their own interests and is completely ignorant of how people consume content on the internet. This isn't surprising given that these industries are essentially dominated by boomer dinosaurs who used to sell us CDs at 30 dollars a pop (30 dollars in the 90s).

Now we can access any song we want with a click of a button. Most publishers provide a way for us to listen to their music, be it Spotify or Youtube. It's in fact really convenient and you can get many excellent versions of the same track, and the publisher gets their view.

This is how I and most people consume music on the Internet. We do not play discrete CDs, and so forth.

One way I am very certain that users do not consume music specifically is by seeking through mine or anyone elses's) twitch archive to look and listen to that song, which is probabbly mixed with in game sounds. Who the **** would do that?

So that leads me to question where is the copyright danger here?

There isn't one. This is a case of a law firm doing busy work to get paid by large copyright holders that don't really have a grasp of their accounts or their industry.

But this practice actually hurts artists and by extension their puiblishers. Why?

Because people don't get to hear their music. My generation, and the previous one tell me the same, that we don't get our music from advertising very much. Music is spread by word of mouth and by ear - a rewvolutionary concept for an aural medium.

The use of these aggressive DMCA tactics by poorly configured automated bots commissioned by lawyers who don't understand the tech or the industry is inherently self-destructive because it takes money away from sales and artists - the primary function of a music publishing business; and gives it to law firms who suppress content - and by extension sales.

Finally, the use of music in conujunction with a game stream or clips is arguably transformative. The pairing of msuic with action or visuals completely transforms and can add entirely different meaning to the work. It also can add a completely new emotional dimension.

The pairing of music in films and in advertisements is demonstrative of this. Unfortunately content creators aren't often in ap osition to challenge the perversions of U.S copyright law often enacted by large unethical companies such as music publishers and movie studios. I mean, these are studios who employed serial rapists and Nazis, but they can be trusted when it comes to copyright?

I don't think so.

One would hope that Twitch has enough market leverage now to sit down with these publishers and say: "Hey, we think you are hurting yourselves here and this "problem" is an opportunity in disguise"

Instead of removing the music, use technology to link viewers to the copyright material on youtube; link them to where they can buy it or listen to it on Google Play/Spotify etc.

That would take much less effort than this silly game of smashing their own content and silencing the free advertising/ word of mouth about their own *** products*.

I listen to music when I play, that's just the honest experience of watching me play. I don't do it for viewers, I just do it because twitch is a convenient source for uploading replays. I don't have the tools or the time to remove audio; and I'm not going to not listen to the music I don't like and own, in my own home, because Sony get upset when someone listens to one of their pedophiles on Youtube's quickplay by accident.

When disputing claimed misuse of copyrighted music, there NEEDS to be a free text field to explain WHY I have a right to include the music I have. You cannot possibly create dropdowns including all the possible explanations, and the current three options are woefully inadequate. In particular, for a platform claiming to be welcoming to musician streamers, it is APPALLING that you fail to allow for performances by the streamer (in which the performance rights therefore belong to the streamer) of compositions which are either traditional or anonymous, or upon which the copyright has expired (in which therefore no party owns the copyright on the composition) where there is a different recording of the same composition in which the performance rights are owned by a different party. This needs sorting as the current situation is denying performer streamers their legal right to do as they choose with their intellectual property, namely their performances of compositions which are not copyrighted by someone else.

My VODs keep getting muted for no reasone because, guess what? VOY QUE QUEMO IS NEVER IN ANY OF MY STREAMS! I've complained about this multiple times, but any appeals I put through get ignored and none of my e-mails ever get taken seriously when I tell people that my VODs will be deleted in 2 days and I submitted the appeal on the day itself. So either take this song from the list or drag Ricky and Mau to court for abuse, because this is a serious problem. The song getting muted is FREE TO USE and from Kevin MacLeod, it doesn't even resemble the song it claims is in there. I've seen multiple people having this problem with them. They are basically owning a song to themselves that isn't theirs.

I would like to use the free to use music, but apparently even that isn't allowed.

Apply the principle of presumption of innocence, as every respectable legal system does. Why, after a copyright claim, do you immediately take down videos or parts of the content or even ban the streames, thus automatically siding with the claimant? Youtube and other services doing this does not make it in any way right. Consider first giving the streamers a reasonable period to defend themselves, and only following on any action after the streamer has been heard and did not make a compelling case for themselves. This will have the benefit of not making you look like so much of a menacing inscrutable machine that can ruin people on a whim.

Music license companies put their videos on Youtube and make money through Youtube. They need to be watched in order to make money. There is no problem when everyone watched its videos individually but a streamer share their videos with crowd of people it is problem because this is loss of earning for them. My suggestion is that when the streamer share a music from Youtube, available number of streamer' spectator be reflected music views. In this way even if streamer does not have any right of broadcasting, music license companies lose anything also they make a profit with the help of streamers. Law should protects intellectual property rights but should not punish streamer for something that everyone reachs free.