Around six weeks after releasing their ‘Soundtrack by Twitch’ catalogue, Twitch has announced a message regarding certain copyright issues. Many major organizations in the music industry have expressed their deep frustration with this live-stream platform because of its repeated action of turning a blind eye to their users’ implementation of unlicensed songs in their uploaded videos. This has led them to take down the streams that contain a copyright infringement of unauthorized tracks and, thus, confuse its creators.
After much bewilderment on the matter, the streaming platform is seeking to do better and solve this dilemma. In a lengthy blog post, they have released their first official guidance on the issue of copyright infringement and goes over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This consists of a set of rules that guides users on how to create their own original content on digital platforms. Among these rules it states that, unless a song is officially licensed, users must refrain from including music that is recorded in their videos.
Users were also told that “if you haven’t already, you should review your historical VODs and Clips that may have music in them and delete any archives that might.”
Twitch also stated that it is currently “actively speaking with the major record labels about potential approaches to additional licenses that would be appropriate for the Twitch service.”
Twitch has recently addressed all the issues that might pertain to this issue, whilst also instructing their users on how to avoid copyright issues and promising them that new tools that might be helpful to streamers will be implemented in due time. In order to view all this information and their official statement, you may click here.
Your questions around music and copyright deserve more complete responses than 280 characters allows. We appreciate your continuing feedback and have compiled a list of your questions that we will be answering on an ongoing basis. https://t.co/8tr9489WmF
— Twitch (@Twitch) November 13, 2020
Image Credits: Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash
