Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns are inconveniences content creators have to deal with on a daily basis, and a recent wave of takedowns has affected several big streamers on Twitch.
There doesn’t appear to be any correlation between the songs targeted in the takedown wave. But the main similarity is that most of the clips were from 2019.
Jakenbakelive, Fuslie, and dozens of other streamers have been dealing with this issue over the last few days. And while nothing has happened beyond the clips being removed, anyone who has received an email about the takedowns was threatened with a 24-hour suspension, although it appears that this only applies to live content as of now and not a clip DMCA.
Some of the songs featured in those clips include “7 Rings” by Ariana Grande, “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, and “Staying Alive” by Bee Gees. Other clips have also been taken down, but these songs are the main offenders that have impacted some of the bigger names on the takedown list.
To combat these takedowns, some streamers have tried to delete clips that might have copyrighted music or mass delete their clip archive.
For a smaller streamer, this wouldn’t be as large of an issue since they could easily curate their clips or delete any video that might end up causing a DMCA search. But for users like Jakenbakelive, who has upwards of 100,000 clips on his channel, that level of curation is next to impossible.
Twitch’s back-end system doesn’t load clips from over a year ago, so that makes any potential manual work much harder, if not completely unmanageable—especially since some claims are hitting clips as far back as 2017.
Much like the copyright system in place on YouTube, it appears that streamers using copyrighted music, which would usually only result in part of the stream VOD being muted, are now going to have to worry about other consequences. If clips that are over six months old are being taken down by DMCA claims, then it is clear some new copyright system is being implemented that could heavily impact how music is used on streams in the future.
And for bigger streamers it is possible that they will need to make a playlist of copyright free music or purchase the rights to any content they would want to use on stream because of this new clip issue. They can’t control what their audience clips, and if DMCA takedowns continue to happen like this, their channel could be hit with additional claims.
