Twitch streamers report significant increase in background music takedown requests

Streamers on Twitch report that they have received quite a few copyright takedown requests in the past few days, which would be a marked increase. It concerns objections about background music in clips that were placed on the video platform between 2017 and 2019.

Twitch speaks about a sudden increase in DMCA takedown requests for background music clips from the previous three years. Streamers who are unsure of the legal situation regarding the audio in past streams are advised by the video platform to remove the clips. Twitch recognizes that many users have large archives and work is underway to make the removal process easier.

Streamers sound the necessary criticism of Twitch. A user, who has already received two copyright notices, says that Twitch employees have told her it’s best to delete all of her clips, even though she says it’s nearly impossible to delete the 100,000+ clips. In addition, the dashboard doesn’t show any of her old videos, leaving her with no idea how to protect herself from the consequences of a third takedown request. Such a third notification means that the account will be canceled, which means that many streamers in this situation now feel compelled to delete old videos in a panic as soon as possible.

There has also been criticism that Twitch suddenly seems to be acting very strict in the form of forwarding takedown requests, handing out warnings and bans for videos that are sometimes years old. Twitch is legally required to act on a report under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but it used to be handled differently. Then Twitch muted the audio of a targeted video if that video was flagged by its own filtering system.

In addition, Twitch’s guidelines are also not very clear with, for example, the situation of games that contain licensed music. As a result questions some streamers are wondering what will happen to videos from the music game Just Dance, for example. It is not clear what is driving the recent increase in takedown requests.