How does Twitch deal with copyright violations?

---

Twitch has said it has received a push of new takedown notices from music publishers regarding copyrighted songs in recorded streams (known as VODs). The notice could be worrisome for some live streamers affected by last year's takedown waves, because if a user receives three copyright infringements on their channel, they will be permanently banned from the platform, according to Twitch's policies.

Twitch said in an email, with this forewarning, it appears that Twitch is trying to anticipate a sudden wave of takedowns and give streamers some time to remove abusive VODs. We recently received a batch of DMCA takedown notices with approximately 1,000 individual claims from music publishers. All the claims are for video-on-demand devices, and the vast majority target streaming devices that listen to background music while playing video games or broadcasting via IRL. Twitch believed the notifications were automatic.

And a lot of this music is copyrighted, which leads to situations like these mass takedowns when the music industry wants to get paid.

Twitch noted that the only way to avoid DMCA (or Digital Millennium Copyright Act) violations is not to stream copyrighted material in the first place, and said that if a player has unauthorized content in their VODs or clips, we strongly recommend that you permanently delete anything containing this material.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) became one of TWITCH's first major releases of the past year. DMCA takedowns became a major problem for broadcast creators last year.

In May, many live stream creators were stunned by sudden takedown requests, and in October, after another wave of copyright notices, Twitch took the step of removing the offending content.

At the time Twitch provided limited tools for live stream creators to manage content in response to the removals, which exacerbated the problem.

The company apologized for the way it handled the situation in November, saying it received far more music-related DMCA notices starting in May than ever before. The company also promised to release better tools to help operators manage legacy content, and followed through on that promise in March. And for those who want to play rights-blocked music in the background of a stream, Twitch offers a product called Soundtrack, which was released worldwide in beta in October.