The streaming platform Twitch has a copyright problem: For weeks, streamers have been showered with copyright advertisements. Countless stream recordings have to be deleted, some streamers are said to have even been banned due to repeated violations. Twitch cannot get the flood of copyright ads under control – and the mood among streamers is noticeably deteriorating.

Video games are primarily streamed on Twitch, some of which contain copyrighted music. Recently, some streamers reported that even sound effects from the game were labeled with copyright claims. The streamer “michalronin” shows a screenshot on Twitter, according to which the company Hollywood Edge is making copyright claims on wind effects from the online role-playing game “World of Warcraft”. Another streamer received a similar warning for police sirens from the game “Persona 5”. These ads do not come from the developers themselves, but from independent companies who apparently have licensed the sound effects to the developers.

Quiet streams as a silent protest The copyright claims on sound effects pose particular problems for the streamers: While the partly copyrighted soundtracks in many games can be muted without major damage, the sound effects are often an even more important aspect of the gaming experience. All the more frustrating is the helpless reaction of the Amazon subsidiary Twitch for many players: If in doubt, you simply have to turn off the entire game sound, the company wrote on Twitter.

Some players have expressed their displeasure with the situation done just that: They turned the sound off in games like Beat Saber and Resident Evil 2. The result are streams that are quite funny in their absurdity – but they are not a long-term solution.

Thousands of ads per week While the criticism of Twitch is getting louder, the streaming platform has apologized in a blog entry for the numerous copyright notices based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA ) feet. In particular, the company regrets the fact that streamers have barely had any tools available to date to delete targeted stream recordings. In the absence of these tools, several streamers had to delete their entire library of recorded streams at once. According to Twitch, it is currently working on better tools for managing past streams.

The main problem for Twitch is the amount of copyright claims: Until May 2020 only 50 copyright claims on music were received by streamers per year. Then the music labels apparently discovered Twitch as a lucrative market: Twitch suddenly received thousands of DMCA inquiries per week. According to Twitch, these copyright advertisements mainly concern recorded streams and clips, some of which are several years old.

The end of this frustrating situation for streamers is not in sight, writes Twitch in the blog entry: “We’re still getting a huge amount of ads and don’t expect it to decrease.”

(dahe)