New York, NY (Top40 Charts) The popular streaming platform of Twitch hasn't been without drama recently as a number of popular names had recently been banned from the platform and other controversies surrounding a number of figures have stirred things up in the community a bit, but news around the site started a little before as an ongoing battle that many have faced with music copyright over the past few years.
Last month, however, this had taken a bit of a worse turn as copyright claims put many channels at risk and the livelihoods of these people at risk too - DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act strikes have been put on content creators since the launch of many of these platforms started, and up until now live streaming with programs such as Spotify playing music in the background had been largely ignored and allowed to some degree, there were plenty who had imagined that this would come sooner or later but many ignored the signs until DMCA strikes went out in a very aggressive way - not only did this impact streamers who were currently live, but it primarily impacted old VODS that had been recorded from previous streams were also flagging copyright claims - this led to many channels being temporarily banned and leading to streamers deleting all of their older videos, thousands and thousands of hours worth of content, to avoid their channel being flagged and banned again once the initial confusion had been cleared up.
This hasn't been the only industry impacted by changes like this too, mobile gaming recently took a bit of a hit as recent changes to regulation led to many having to adjust their strategy to remain open, initiatives such as Gamstop which had been aimed at reducing participation options had recently been made mandatory, but as many operators chose to register elsewhere such as those here at casinos not on Gamstop there had been a little more stability, but may still cause some issues in to the future.
As of now many of the issues have since been cleared up - the majority of streamers have turned to non copyright playlists to make sure that anything played on their livestream and recorded videos can't be claimed under DMCA, and there are some that have successfully reached out to popular artists to get their permission to use their music with the most notable case being in the streamer TrainwrecksTV who had reached out to rapper 21 Savage and got a reply - although this was a bit of a unique case, as the rapper owns all of his masters for the music produced he was in a position to grant this permission were other artists weren't, it does pose some questions for the future however as many content creators are going to need to be much more careful in what is used in videos or streams in order to stay safe, and there's still the likelihood that many will be caught out, whether intentional or not.
