Bad times for the community Twitch. After so many streamers had their videos removed for copyright violation by various record labels, now things get even more absurd with some of their videos being flagged for copyright violation based on simple sounds of effects in some games.
Videos without sound on Twitch
Imagine that you are doing a live streaming of Hitman: Blood Money and in full game sounds of birds and insects sound. What could go wrong? Well, that is exactly what has happened to a user, who claims to have received a block on the video of his game, since the service has silenced the audio of the clip due to the violation of the copyright of certain sounds.
I got a copyright claim on Hitman: Blood Money because of the bird and insect noises in A Vintage Year.
— B.Creature 🐀 (@SL128t) November 12, 2020
This and many other cases are beginning to appear on the service. A sound of a police siren in 5 person, the sound of twelve o'clock on a pendulum clock... completely incomprehensible cases that are already affecting a large number of users for the simple fact of playing a game.
You mutated me for a police siren in Persona 5.
Should we turn off game sound effects too based on that advise then? >¦( pic.twitter.com/zZLY4ZFaQv
— Ominous Bagel 🥯 (@OminousBagel) November 12, 2020
How far does the license go?
Contrary to what happens with music when streamers play background music while playing or chatting live, this time the reason for the complaint is something as simple as posting a game play. To give you an idea, when a developer works on a game, he uses audio libraries to complete his work, and they access these audios through licenses.
It's the same process of paying for a stock photo to get work done. You pay the rights to the photo, and you use it in your work. But can that job be used inside another job? That is where the problem in question comes in.
Streamers are making money by using the games (which they previously purchased) for their video broadcasts, but apparently the creators of the sounds included in those games are not going to allow them to be reused without their permission. Hence the DMCA violation notices.
Twitch has already apologized for how things were being handled with the issue of music rights, but it seems that they should not have the situation too controlled if these types of incomprehensible errors now appear.
@Carlos Martines, just yesterday Twitch sent an email, I had never seen such a long email from them, explaining all the reasons why the DMCA has this attitude, they indicated that less than 50 notifications were received per year about the audios and now more than thousand every week.