Photo Credit: Mika Baumeister
Twitch adds new mass-delete tool to help creators avoid DMCA strikes against their accounts.
Giving streamers the ability to mass-delete past streams helps them stay on the right side of the law. Users who rack up enough copyright strikes against their account risk being perma-banned. Twitch announced the feature in an email to creators and said it was a direct response to the massive DMCA take-downs last year.
Twitch is also releasing some new tools to help creators deal with these issues immediately. When a user gets a DMCA take-down request against their account, it shows up in their inbox. The video producer also shows the number of copyright strikes a channel has received. Streamers can now un-publish or delete their videos in batches of 20 at a time.
Twitch is also fine-tuning the granularity of the search feature for deleting clips. It will eventually allow streamers to delete clips from their channel, sorted by game, date, or view count. That makes it easier to all offending content by game or when it happened.
The DMCA take-downs have also hit musicians who stream their own music on the platform. In 2015, Twitch launched its Creative and IRL categories. After those categories exploded in growth, Twitch added a category for music live streams in 2018. DJs flocked to the platform to take advantage of an active and captive audience.
Many DJs and live artists turned to Twitch during the coronavirus pandemic. Entire concerts and music festivals have been held on the platform. StreamElements reports that music watching on the platform rose from 3.6 million hours to 17.6 million hours over the course of 2020.
Despite the huge audience growth, many artists are hesitant to join the platform because of the DMCA threat. Music identification on Twitch is entirely automatic, which leads to frustrating appeals cases.
“At the beginning, a lot of the music that received DMCAs was music by my label,” confirms one artist. “So I’m seeing DMCAs for stuff that I owned. I had to speak to my distributor and ask, ‘what’s causing these strikes?'” A database called Audible Magic was responsible. Once the artist removed his tracks from the platform, DMCA noticed stopped.
To avoid these situations entirely, some DJs are looking at building their own live-streaming solutions. They won’t have the same monetization features that Twitch has built-in, but with NFTs and blockchain technology – they may not need to in the near-future.