This is old news and it was wrong. This happend at the height of a new wave of DMCA claims, so people simply assumed this had to be the reason. But it turned out later he showed some nudity, for which he got the usual 3 day-ban.
Also, DMCA claims are not automatically leading to bans. It must have a certain level of harm ir repeated behaviour. And live-DMCA-checks are not active yet it seems, so usually the vod or clip will be deleted and the streamer get's a warning.
If he was playing his own composition live, it's not the recording that the label owns. This is why revenue from live shows doesn't go to labels. This is also why Taylor Swift is re-recordings her old songs, for another example.
The label would not own the performance, no, but he would still not be allowed to give a performance of any material he does not own without the permission of the rightsholder.
There are some “reasonable fair use” exceptions such as simply singing a certain tune, but the point is that the fact that he wrote the original composition is irrelevant; it only matters that he owns the copyright.
If the copyright indeed were transferred to the label, then he enjoys no more rights to perform it than anyone else.
Yes, to clarify, I meant if he owns the composition. It's possible a publisher owns or co-owns it, even if he wrote it (but unlikely that a label would).
Labels typically own the rights to the recordings, not the compositions. If the band wrote their own composition, they either retain the rights to them or they may have sold them (partially or in full) to another party, typically a publisher.
There are many arguments that can be made for the idea that copyright should not be transferable, much like reputation rights, but Twitch is certainly no party to blame for that it is.
When will platforms start to be charged for their mistakes?
Pretty sure if they had to make financial compensations for their mistakes, they would start using humans more often to support this crap automated system.
You would start to see more people being able to reach human support, getting human replies, etc.
Would be pretty easy - for each day without reply, fine X. For X day of suspension, fine Y. And so on.
If they give tools for people to make their lively hood on, then they are responsible for their mistakes. This is happening for far too long, on too many platforms: Youtube, Amazon, Twitch... only if you have special access to insiders, or if you're some kind of celebrity, or you reach a massive outcry, is when you are able to reach a human that solves your problem rather quickly?
The ToS makes no guarantee it'll be there to make your livelihood on tomorrow because you are today. Tomorrow it could say "no music, we don't like that noise" and you'd be shit outta luck because video hosting isn't a public service.
Not to mention this doesn't solve anything, who arbitrates the absolute mountain of disputes that come out of this which is just the same thing moved up a level? Especially when someone boys a competitor. The "simple" idea would take hundreds of pages of detail to even be implementable before we started talking about if it was a good idea.
The idea of whether or not a job is efficient to exist is independent of this. There are other ways to distribute money than creating jobs with output we don't need. I.e. maybe this is something we decide is a useful public service and we do create some public department to arbitrate this - great, we created the work because we said the work was worthwhile. My guess is most don't consider a place to host your videos/livestreams a public service though and trying to regulate the private companies in a way they'd function like a public service instead would both be unpopular and extraordinarily inefficient/complicated.
The comment at the end of your comment is probably what triggered the negative response here at HN for what it's worth.
You make them pay by abandoning them as a customer. Stop streaming. Stop watching.
Fining businesses who make mistakes is a dangerous path. That means anyone new to the industry who tosses up their first project is open to getting fined if they make a mistake. It also means there is either some organization in charge of being the watchdog for the industry with power to just apply fines to companies as they see fit... or we are doing this via lawsuits which just means cranking up litigation to absurd levels.
No, it is better to pressure businesses via our own choices to only patronize those who treat their customers and subscribers well. We talk about it all the time on here - stop using Facebook, stop using Google, find alternatives that match your ideals.
We need to truly embrace those types of grassroots change if we want to drive behavioral changes.
Im with you (in spirit). But we know at this point how network effects function and thats just not a practical solution. Leaving facebook, youtube, etc.. is similar to leaving your country and moving to a remote island in the middle of the ocean.
The solution is (partly) already here, its called breaking up monopolies which are illegal (and it would be wise to break up oligopolies). For instance YouTube has no real competition. 2000 million users vs what? Vimeos 1.5 million? Tech monopolies/oligopolies will always make the case that there is a rich marketplace of competitors by pointing out small fringe platforms that cant gain real traction but they know better internally and the stats confirm. Dont expect anything to change as they keep greasing your representatives. They spent record money on democrat elections this year and they expect their back to be scratched with lenient H1B visa programs to lower labor costs and lenient marketplace enforcement.
as mass exodus is slow to start and looks like churn when there are no comments or nonkudos given, there should be a sanction received so there is real motivation to not do so bad
And if it's your livelyhood, go where? The next two most dominant rivals in the area of streaming are literally the two you call out later in your post, Facebook and Google. You're not going to make money by trying to get people to get people to switch to your niche streaming service that no one has heard of and will close up shop in a year.
Individual action, especially consumer action, has never been a driving force in effecting change. If it were, companies like Nestle, which you hear about the despicable practices of almost weekly on commenting sites like reddit, wouldn't still be market leaders. Legislation, litigation, and most importantly, collective action are the only ways to change things like this. Don't tell people to boycott a service, get them to unionize their de facto employees.
Instead of fining businesses, perhaps the answer is litigation.
I’m not sure what their TOS says, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it protects from this, but yeah, the liability should be that you open yourself up to being sued if you erroneously remove a user from your platform, who is using it as their job
codingdave already gave the answer. If you are dissatisfied with the service, cease to employ it. If bad actors are protected by barriers to entry, work to lower the barriers.
Competition is your best hope. Chasing artificial alternatives is a poor choice.
This is driven by overly cautious attorneys. Twitch has obviously been attacked by some rights holders so they over compensate in an effort to protect themselves from future legal challenges.
They do get charged for their mistakes. When creators lose money, Twitch loses money too. For copyright infringement, humans aren't much any better (see the Katy Perry/Flame lawsuit). Even if the solution was more human review, it would be unprofitable to allow smaller channels to monetize, and inevitably people would complain about that too.
Never, because it's impossible to have a platform if keeping something content up gets them fined AND taking content down gets them fined.
They don't have perfect knowledge of how a court would rule in each case, so they err on the side of caution. Remove the side of caution and you can't have a platform.
> When will platforms start to be charged for their mistakes? Pretty sure if they had to make financial compensations for their mistakes, they would start using humans more often to support this crap automated system.
How exactly would you enforce this? Media companies have the right to not show content from a given artist, at any time, for any reason. If you passed a law saying that twitch has to pay fines for false DMCA takedowns, they would simply take down the same artist anyway, without giving them any reason whatsoever. Which hurts the artist even more - now they can't even appeal the decision, because they would have no idea why it occurred
It’s easy to blame the platforms here, but this is just a symptom of the root problem. This will continue to be an issue as long as most art is controlled by litigious conglomerates trying to protect their cash cows.
The immediate fix is to fine the entities filing false DMCA claims, not the platforms enforcing them. The longer term fix is to take away power and control from these giant corporations and give it back to the artists.
> If you passed a law saying that twitch has to pay fines for false DMCA takedowns
You have to dig deeper, beyond the platforms themselves: make it extremely expensive and dangerous to file copyfraud claims. As long as the incentives are in favour of carpetbombing, you will have lots of casualties.
Repeating something I have said before, it feels to me the correct solution would be to go full Hammurabi on the perverse incentives. To eliminate the asymmetric warfare, one change would be enough. -- If a company, or an agent acting in their name, files a fraudulent copyright takedown, then the victim of that takedown gets to choose one item from that company's catalog that will become public domain. The company also becomes liable for all the lost [royalty] income for the creators of that particular item.
The point is not to eliminate takedowns or make them technologically less effective. Goal should be to eliminate the incentives on abusing them, and make the depletion of culture a bad default.
Public businesses are held to higher standards on choosing who to do business with than individuals, so why shouldn't monopolies be held to even higher standards? No secret takedowns, only allowed method is to follow the dmca law process, not take down whatever they want whenever they want. If they don't want to do that, then they can choose to not be a monopoly by raising prices significantly and leave room for competitors.
This perspective is completely baffling to me. This was an algorithmic mistake not a targeted attacked, Twitch is also a free service the use of which is a privilege not a right. This is just a product of the business environment surrounding copyrighted works and advertising, Twitch would be perfectly happy to continue raking in cash from everything on the platform, but that just isn't possible. If you just think about how things work for a second its obvious that twitch and other video platforms have a huge incentive NOT to take things down, but somehow people discount the profit motive for these services.
> When will platforms start to be charged for their mistakes?
When they start to charge their customers.
I know I’ll get downvoted first this, but this kind of thing happens because each user in general is earning them cents and the the only way to enforce their policies is to do it on mass with automation and review by a human if the person complains (and then often rushed and not very well).
Although some large accounts will get account managers and are handled more carefully. The truth is that even if these are deleted, their viewers will just spend their time watching others.
When you enter into a contract with Twitch, the language basically says "neither of us puts any money into this venture to begin with, and we share profits as they come and none of us is responsible for any losses incurred by the other".
The same language that keeps Twitch from being responsible here, keeps you from being responsible if your controversial content causes advertisers to pull out of Twitch, making them lose potential profits.
I'm naturally concerned about this because my brother in law has a regular, ongoing streaming music show/channel on Twitch with live and pre-recorded bands (most of them local to the SF bay area). He's putting a lot of effort into it: professional-level sound engineering and lighting (his day job is a recording engineer/producer and, pre-covid, stage lighting engineer), multiple camera shoots with dollys and booms and an experienced volunteer crew.
He of course is aware of Twitch's trigger-happy approach to DMCA and so one of the requirements is that bands play only original music they own the copyright to.
So far so good, but I fear one day the algorithm is going to have a false positive, or someone busts out a spontaneous Happy Birthday, and then his channel suddenly goes dark, and all that hard work gets tanked.
He really should, so to speak, spread his risk; there's multiple streaming and video platforms, and unless he got paid a ton of money to become exclusive to Twitch he is under no obligation to be exclusive to Twitch. I mean I know he'll get the biggest audience via Twitch but it's a big risk to bet everything on one proverbial horse.
I can't speak for why Herman Li, or any other musician, would be banned for DMCA. But, its my understanding that Twitch pays for a live performance license from the major music publishers to enable musicians to stream on their platform [1]. Of course, this didn't work for Herman Li, but I think it at least speaks to their long-term goals for the platform.
Additionally, while they say to never play recorded music on stream, unless from a source where the copyrights are taken care of, their specific recommendations even in this "clarification" post are very opaque. Never play recorded music on stream, unless you own all the rights, but you probably don't, if you're not sure turn off your VODs. None of that is consistent with some overarching idea of why people get DMCA'd; would I get DMCA'd for playing recorded music live, but not having VODs? I would guess even Twitch doesn't know; its outside of their control.
In short, music on Twitch is REALLY risky, primarily because their rights enforcement is so immature. Its akin to them wildly shooting in the air with a machine gun. YouTube's Content ID is a bit more mature and predictable, so diversifying there may be a good idea.
Just to point it out this was back in Oct at the height of the DMCA stuff* I believe. Not to say it makes it any better but I can see how they might have been trigger happy at the time.
I opened this article "Again?!"
* Ooh I've ended up on the top. For context to people not in and around Twitch the RIAA woke up and started handing out DMCAs like it was going out of fashion. Twitch naturally had to respond to the DMCAs to keep fair harbour and the masses misdirected their anger at Twitch for a while.
Low rung news saw the ability to inhale clicks so they've written it in a "lol stupid Twitch" attitude instead of the mid-noughties classic "Fuck the RIAA"
> Ooh I've ended up on the top. For context to people not in and around Twitch the RIAA woke up and started handing out DMCAs like it was going out of fashion. Twitch naturally had to respond to the DMCAs to keep fair harbour and the masses misdirected their anger at Twitch for a while.
I don't think they've stopped either, CDPR had to issue a warning to streamers to keep the music muted, because there are bits of licensed music which Cyberpunk 2077's dedicated setting doesn't mute / replace, leading to possible DMCA strikes on streamer channels.
I think they are implying that public domain works are attacked globally because a company thinks they own it in one country. Take Happy Birthday, for example: in the UK it is considered a traditional song and is therefore public domain, but in the US there are no such protections against copyright and therefore Time Warner thinks they own it.
The problem is that Universal is the owner of the copyrights (including the lyrical and syncronisation copyrights), and this is DMCA we're talking about. This would end up differently in Europe or UK (the original authors are irrevocably entitled to some percentage of the revenue, typically 5%) but DMCA is based on American laws (which do not have these protections).
Maybe even in a commercial context. In fact it's quite likely that concerts get treated specially. The issue is, these automated censorship tools don't encode the nuanced clauses of such contracts. They err on the side of banning, even if it's perfectly legitimate.
Also IMO in the digital age it's so stupid that teachers can't even read a book to children via Zoom without a license...
This is a fair point, though. Just because you're the producer doesn't mean you're the owner. Book authors often go to publishing houses to get their book published, in which case the author has little control over their work. Also, commissioned works are usually copyright to the commissioner or other employer, that's why Doctor Who is copyright to the BBC, not Steven Moffat.
Which the author gets royalties for giving. The system is made so authors get money and publishers do too from their books. They are jointly using the authors copyrighted work for mutual benefit.
What's not included and valuable? Adaptations, foreign translations, sequels, etc.
Music copyright is complicated and there are certain rights that attach to each performance vs. the music. If I sit down and play Bach that recording cannot be copied without my permission but you can sit down and record your own performance of Bach.
Yes, compulsory licencing and royalty sharing applies. Also, if the recording is made from a performance in a venue, the owner must obtain a blanket licence from the music rights organisation.
In the US you don’t need to get the copyright holder's permission to record cover songs, you need to pay for a mechanical license. In the case of live performances you don’t need to get permission directly. The venue is the one that pays royalties to a handful of groups that have agreements with thousands of artists.
Yup. I have a strong “fuck you” to ASCAP for charging my favorite small coffee shop insurmountable fees and forcing them to stop having live musical performances. FWIW the musicians played mostly original work.
ASCAP has also been actively against the EFF, Creative Commons, and others.
> In June 2010, ASCAP sent letters to its members soliciting donations to fight entities that support weaker copyright restrictions, such as Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Creative Commons
Yes, I am aware of how the law currently works. I think that it is unethical and that my playing of some pop song on the piano shouldn't be covered by property law because my performance is not owned by someone else.
But the song you’re playing is owned by someone else. I can understand the case for carving out an exception for this use but it doesn’t change the fact that your derived work now has two copyright holders: the original artist and you.
Copyright doesn't cover live performances, this would be ASCAP licensing or something similar though it seems if he's "playing his own music" then none of the above should apply.
Just so people aren’t misled - ASCAP is a not-for-profit, it isn’t a government agency. I think a more accurate word for it is “cabal” since most people don’t know much about them and that they often work against (IMO) the public interest.
I meant that someone can't assert copyright over your live performance of your own compositions as it occurs. Copyright can be asserted over a recording of course. Someone might try to assert copyright over portions of the music I suppose. In this context though there's no way for copyright to be valid unless he's assigned the copyright to someone else which doesn't seem to be the case barring any further information.
> ... a certain song (CDPR didn’t say which one) during the game’s “Braindance” sequences might trigger a Digital Millennium Copyright Act strike. That’s even if you’re using the specific in-game setting designed to toggle off copyrighted music for this exact reason.
All these comments and not one of how awesome Herman Li is? Even if you are not at all into the type of music he plays (though, come on, shredding and video game sounds!) I think there's quite a virtuosity to be appreciated. Plus he tries (not sure how that fits with record companies) to let people use his music as they want.
Has he gotten better live? I remember his older live shows he could be a real drunken sloppy mess compared to the album recordings. I was fairly disappointed seeing them live.
I haven't seen in many years, but the one concert I saw I remember being most awesome (this was almost 15 years ago now). I do remember everyone having a beer handy on stage, but don't remember it getting too messy at the end.
There are so many note sequences compressed in his solos that it’s plausible that in some part of it it randomly violates someone’s IP or fully describes Pi
Every time I upload a video of me playing a "classical" work (Bach, Chopin, Mozart) on the piano, I get a YouTube warning and the content blocked. So far, about two dozen times, I challenge it and it comes back, but I expect someday to exceed some threshold and be gone forever.
Some of the challengers are "scam" companies, but other times it's Deutsche Gramophone or Sony.
Alternatively, you are playing from a modern typesetting of the music which has some extra notes added to detect that you are making a derivative work through your performance, like how map makers add "trap streets" to their works.
Being serious, though, I believe that a typesetting of a piece of public domain music can be eligible for copyright, but I don't believe that a performance from that typesetting can count as a derivative work of the typesetting, even if the musician faithfully performs a few "new" notes added by the typesetter.
We need better laws to punish false DMCA takedowns. We can’t put this on the platforms because the cost of this ignoring a true DMCA request is so high. We need to fix it so that when the engineers go to talk to the legal team, the legal team can give advice that points in a different direction, which means new laws.
They don't bully the tech corps, they bully content creators using the DMCA, and the tech corps have to let them do it by law. And big corps in general, tech or not, know that it's in their best interest to not blatantly and visibly break the law, lest it invite additional regulations or penalties. The problem fundamentally is a warped counterproductive copyright law that enables organizations like the RIAA to do what they do.
Not suggesting they break the law. I mean, these copyright laws were put in place by intense lobbying from megacorps. Why don't megacorps that stand to gain from more relaxed copyright law do the same?
What's to gain by actively fighting the RIAA? They know that they are an oligopoly when it comes to content distribution. They only have to keep content creators happy enough to avoid disruption by upstart competition, and they only have to keep regulators happy enough to not get regulated harder. It's not like there are serious alternatives to Twitch, Youtube, and Facebook if you want to make money streaming. All 3 of those companies have more or less the same incentives to act (or not act) in the same way.
I really don’t see how this is news. Automated system that matches song samples and can’t possibly know if a steamer went and licensed the copyrighted music on their stream trips on hearing copyrighted music. The banhammer falls automatically because there are so few cases (like this one) of legitimate usage requiring the content to be restored.
Like if anyone on HN was tasked to design a system to protect your companies asses against copyright lawsuits you would implement the same thing.
I don't think it's the automated detection that's a problem. It's the "you cannot object, you have no recourse, you cannot reply, you cannot show your license, and when we decide this has happened enough times, you cannot use our platform" that's the problem.
Yes, an automated system that flags content but is human reviewed would be more reasonable. But the human review part slows things down and you end up losing much of the advantage of the automated system as you would be throttled by human review or have to spend much more on manpower.
Why? Their purpose is to stop platforms from getting sued for copyright violations. They are remarkably successful to that end.
Their goal isn’t to allow all content that wouldn’t get them sued but to catch all content that would. False positives get you angry messages on Twitter but false negatives get you multimillion dollar lawsuits.
Then it’s not a system that works and shouldn’t be in place. You can’t just say, that’ll do, it’s too hard or expensive to do this properly, so let’s not.
Amazon is one of the wealthiest companies in the world and could easily manually moderate channels before auto-banning them. As consumers we don’t have to accept these excuses for substandard services.
I don’t get this. The entire point of these systems is to detect and stop copyright violations because they open up platforms to lawsuits. It’s not enough to just respond to DMCA takedowns after the lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube because (I think pretty reasonably personally) these platforms previously enabled copyright violations at a scale that literally could not be policed by copyright holders and so ContentID and the like was the compromise.
Me too, for a different reason (he doesn't technically own the copyrights, Universal does). I do not support it, but if I were a signed artist, this wouldn't shocked me.
Also, DMCA claims are not automatically leading to bans. It must have a certain level of harm ir repeated behaviour. And live-DMCA-checks are not active yet it seems, so usually the vod or clip will be deleted and the streamer get's a warning.