According to the company, starting this May, reps for music companies began sending thousands of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) copyright-takedown notices targeted at users’ archived content, “mostly for snippets of tracks in years-old clips.” Before then, Twitch said, it received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications per year. Twitch said it was caught off guard by the music industry’s crackdown on unlicensed music on its service. The letter, among other things, accused Twitch of “allowing and enabling its streamers to use our respective members’ music without authorization, in violation of Twitch’s music guidelines.” music organizations - including the RIAA, the Recording Academy, the National Music Publishers Association, the Music Managers Forum, the American Association of Independent Music and SAG-AFTRA - sent a letter last month to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (copying Twitch CEO Emmet Shear). Twitch’s music-copyright communiqué comes after several major U.S. “We’re open-minded to new structures that could work for Twitch’s unique service, but we must be clear that they may take some time to materialize or may never happen at all,” the company said in the blog. The Amazon-owned live-streaming platform also claimed that it is “actively speaking with the major record labels about potential approaches to additional licenses that would be appropriate for the Twitch service.” However, the company also said that the “current constructs for licenses” that record labels have with other services (which typically take a cut of revenue from creators for payment to record labels) “make less sense for Twitch.” In what appears to be its first official guidance on the issue, Twitch in a lengthy blog post Wednesday told streamers that they must stop playing recorded music on their streams (unless it’s officially licensed) and that “if you haven’t already, you should review your historical VODs and Clips that may have music in them and delete any archives that might.” Twitch, after getting blasted by major music-industry orgs for turning a blind eye to the use of unlicensed songs on its service - and frustrating and confusing Twitch creators for deleting their videos for copyright violations - is vowing to do better.
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December 2022
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