Twitch Issues An Apology For Brutal Mass Streamer Bans
Twitch has apparently seen the error of its ways as the supersized streaming platform has issued an apology for its recent wave of mass banning. Ban trackers like @StreamerBans have been working overtime to keep track of who is and isn't allowed on Twitch right now. Twitch has taken a scythe and hacked its way through Twitch with a huge number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedowns.
For those who don't know, the DCMA prevents the use of unlicensed music being featured in streams. While this obviously covered someone using the latest chart-topper prominently in a stream, it's also extended much further than this. If you're anything like most gamers, chances are you'll have music playing in the background. Even background music is subject to a DCMA takedown, and Twitch has left no stone unturned as it has gone back years.
In the past week alone, we've covered how FaZe Clan's John “Cizzorz” Cizek has been given the boot from Twitch, as well as football legend Neymar Jr. vanishing from the platform. Some think Neymar Jr. was banned for revealing Richarlison's phone number on a stream, however, Twitch never reveals its reasons. This means that while any number of these bans could be DCMA related, we'll never know.
In a blog post titled “Music-Related Copyright Claims and Twitch", Twitch issued an apology to anyone affected. It read, "Your frustration and confusion with recent music-related copyright issues is completely justified. Things can – and should – be better for creators than they have been recently, and this post outlines our next steps to get there".
Although Twitch is remaining committed to its DCMA takedowns, at least it has vowed to do better. The post continued, "You’re rightly upset that the only option we provided was a mass deletion tool for Clips, and that we only gave you three-days’ notice to use this tool. We could have developed more sophisticated, user-friendly tools awhile ago. That we didn’t is on us. And we could have provided creators with a longer time period to address their VOD and Clip libraries – that was a miss as well. We’re truly sorry for these mistakes, and we’ll do better".
It sounds like Twitch was completely unprepared for the uptick in DCMA takedowns. Back in May, Twitch was apparently receiving around 50 requests from record labels every year. Jump forward to now and it's skyrocketed to thousands of requests every week. Twitch is caught between a rock and a hard place, but admits it didn't handle things correctly.
Thankfully, Twitch has vowed to work closer with its content creators to try and prevent bans. Namely, there are new tools like expanded technology to detect copyrighted audio in clips and “more granular ways to manage your archive". Twitch also used the opportunity to promote its own Soundtrack library that contains DCMA-friendly music. For now though, there are still lots of streamers who've been hit with the ban hammer and have no idea why.
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