Twitch’s DMCA crisis may get worse as labels ramp up “enforcement programs”
Unsplash: Caspar Camille Rubin / TwitchThe DMCA crisis on Twitch is going to get worse before it gets better. The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) has announced the body is ramping up its takedown campaign on Twitch to “remove music which Amazon refuses to pay for”.
Twitch streamers big and small are looking down the barrel of the platform’s worst DMCA takedown crisis yet.
Record labels and the music industry are pushing the Amazon-owned company to stop content creators from using unlicensed music, or more takedowns will be filed across 2021.
The NMPA — a music publisher industry body whose mission “is to protect, promote, and advance the interests of music’s creators” — said it was going to continue “removing music which Amazon refuses to pay for” in “a major ramp-up of its takedown campaign.”
“Twitch should serve its users by fully licensing music which would allow the platform to flourish and copyright owners to be properly compensated,” president David Israelite said at the NMPA’s June 9 annual meeting.
TwitchAn “intensive enforcement program to ID and remove unlicensed songs from Twitch” is already underway.
A Twitch spokesperson told Dexerto that the company complies with all DMCA requests, as required by US law.
However, they are liaising with the music industry to find a solution for creators on their platform.
“Our conversations with music rights holders, both with labels and publishers, are active and ongoing, and we continue to work with them to establish potential approaches that would be appropriate for the Twitch service and our entire community,” they said.
This includes recent measures implemented by Twitch like mass clip and VOD deletion features and the Soundtrack tool that gives creators “rights-cleared music”.
TwitchMore tools, like the ability to file counterclaims from the Creator Dashboard — instead of via email — are coming later in 2021.
Creators have pushed Twitch to go even further though, and try to emulate YouTube’s system. This includes wiping strikes after 90 days, rather than the very strict three-strikes policy currently in place.
Twitch went from receiving less than 50 DMCA takedown requests a year to over 1,000 a week in a matter of months according to a November 2020 statement.
