"Twitch Trimming Archives & Muting Copyrighted Music"

[kane_magus]

I never really cared all that much about Twitch before, and I'm not going to start now, thanks to stuff like this. I just wonder if this sudden move has anything to do with them potentially being bought by Google. (EDIT) Looks like the deal did go through, so I'm pretty sure that this is indeed related to that. (/EDIT) I will say that this is just yet another example of the need to fix horribly broken and outdated copyright laws and/or the software that is supposedly intended to enforce them.

(EDIT 2) Thing is... everyone is blaming Google for this, as though Google is the mastermind behind all of this crap. Google is only (over)reacting, that's all. While it's true that Google is indeed doing a terribly piss poor job at implementing their copyright protection software, the main reason they're even doing so in the first place is so that they won't become a target of the excessively sue-happy dinosaurs in the music industry (or so they hope). So if you're going to blame anyone, blame the RIAA. And blame government for letting laws be written by the lobbyists for such. (/EDIT 2)

Comments

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

"Twitch CEO confirms audio scanning and muting won't be added to livestreams" (http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/08/07/twitch-ceo-confirms-audio-scanning-and-muting-wont-be-added-to-livestreams/)

...for the moment.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

""We want every broadcaster on Twitch to be protected from potential liability," he said. "No matter how remote you might feel the issue is, we aren't willing to run the risk someone's life gets ruined over this.""

That's kinda bullshit right there honestly. IF they cared about their users, they would have been doing this from the start. This is entirely because they're being eaten by Youtube and youtube does this to protect -itself- from the IP vultures of the world.

The only reason live streams aren't going to be affected is because at present they haven't a clue how to seriously implement it, as he pretty much states himself with the "even if we could" attachment to his statement.

I do fully expect them to hand out "strikes" on this instead however. With after so many strikes of automatically detected infringement occurring, the account is frozen. And of course that would suck for those being hit up by false positives - either innocently, or maliciously. (As in people claiming copyright to completely bogus shit among other possibilities.)

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Even now, streamed stuff isn't safe, at least not on Youtube (and, consequently, not on Twitch anymore). I saw a comment on one of the previous articles where someone pointed out that a live stream of a convention was killed by Youtube because the people in the crowd started singing "Happy Birthday." (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131014/15323524876/youtube-kills-livestream-convention-when-audience-starts-singing-happy-birthday.shtml) So, really, all they'd need to do to implement it on streams is to just hook every stream on the service into whatever they're using to detect copyrighted music, and then, if they detect the beginnings of such a song on that stream, kill the stream altogether.

The sheer fact that the goddamned Happy fucking Birthday song is apparently still in copyright is one of the very best examples of what is so utterly fucked up about copyright, in general. (Though that may not be the case for much longer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Copyright_status), hopefully, at least for this one particular song.)