<Nelson-voice> "Haaa, ha."
Twitch streamers are getting blindsided by years-old copyright notices
The claimant was listed as the RIAA, and the infringing material was mostly recorded clips of old live broadcasts. And that's a problem because it's stated very clearly in the Twitch terms of service that if your account is dinged with three of these strikes, you get permabanned from Twitch.
The clips themselves were sometimes years old, too, which is a bigger headache because streamers who have been on the platform long enough have accumulated tons of these and now have a backlog rights holders can mine to file takedowns. Twitch doesn't have the tools yet to let creators bulk delete clips, let alone sift through hundreds at a time that may or may not contain copyright infringing content.
This is why we don't use Twitch, people.
See, Twitch used to be called Justin.TV, and for several years we used them as our video streaming host, because the price was right (free). But then they "pivoted" their business from "stream anything" to "stream video games only" and became Twitch. And on the day they announced that, they shut down Justin.TV to anything that wasn't gaming, leaving us and all of their other users in the lurch. Literally less than 24 hours notice.
Well, a few years later, they decided to expand from "only games" back to "pretty much anything", and they came sniffing around DNA Lounge again. "Hey, we'd love to have your Compelling Content our our site. Of course we're going to put pop-up ads all over your shit, and by the way, you can't ever webcast a burlesque show, because we're a Family Friendly Company."
Photorealistic in-game murder, sure. A pastie? Hey now, think about the children.
Twitch's terms of service now explicitly exclude DJ sets, karaoke, lip-sync, and even cover songs. So that's pretty much the end of that.
So Twitch was already not-to-be-trusted, for sure, but the real problem here is that the Content Mafia has bullied the tech industry (and by tech industry I mean Google, because nobody else matters) into making the process of asserting copyright infringement trivial, fast, and easy to automate; while making the process of making an appeal on the grounds of Fair Use, or any other reason, damned near impossible.
Everything is terrible, is what I'm saying, and getting worse.
Anyway, are you looking to put together a streaming show? DNA Lounge has the facilities and infrastructure for it. Mail us at booking@dnalounge.com.
Our recently-upgraded webcast regime has been working out reasonably well, though I am continuously frustrated at how flaky OBS is. Sometimes it just decides to stop streaming the video's audio track until it is restarted, even though the audio is showing up on its in-app level meters. How very.
Maaaaaybe this is because the computers running it are a little underpowered. Do you have a Mac Mini lying around that you don't need any more? We can always give those a good home. For the webcast, a 2018-vintage Mini or two would be super helpful, but we can find a use for anything 2010 or later. We end up using them for all kinds of things.
