FACE THE MUSIC

After DMCA takedowns, Twitch has to make peace with the music biz

- Wes Fenlon

Metallica never scored a Legend of Zelda game, but it sounded like it when Twitch replaced Metallica’s BlizzCon 2021 concert with cheery midi music. The biggest streaming platform in the world had to censor its own broadcast or risk upsetting an already aggravated music industry.

In 2020 the music industry attacked Twitch in a letter claiming it “continues to turn a blind eye to the same users violating the law while pocketing the proceeds of massive unlicensed uses of recorded music”. After largely ignoring Twitch for years, the music industry started sending thousands of DMCA takedowns for copyright violations. So Twitch reacted—dramatically. In October, it forced streamers to delete thousands of old VODs, with no good tools to determine which files were problematic.

The music industry is upset with copyrighted music in live streams and VODs, but Twitch’s existing solutions are all for the latter. It also insists that Twitch needs to pay for broader licences for its Soundtrack tool, which is meant to let streamers play licensed music safely. If the music industry continues to press, is that Metallica concert just a preview of what enforcement will look like in a few years, with automated tools detecting and silencing copyrighted material live, instead of just cleaning up VODs?

“[That’s what] I would expect,” says Kellen Voyer, a lawyer who specializes in IP and technology law. “With all-new technology there’s a period of freedom, then a teething period, then some form of equilibrium between the technology and rights holders. Then another technology emerges and it starts all over again.”