The DMCA has absolutely ruined a decade+ long hobby of mine, which was streaming/content creation. I used to have really fun streams not that long ago that featured a variety of relaxing/cool music set to the backdrop of me messing around on the computer, or in some game. Everyone was fine with this arrangement for a long time. Then, things suddenly changed a few years ago. First your VODs would get yanked and you'd get a warning if you played some extremely popular song, and it was like ok, I understand that. But now it's even spread to in game audio of a game I literally have purchased. That is ridiculous to me. There are games I actually cannot publish playing with full audio settings enabled. That is ridiculous no matter your views on the DMCA, and I'd even go farther and say it's completely ridiculous that I cannot use audio I have purchased or somehow leased on my own content. Why does it have to be this way? Someone can try to convince me this is somehow sane or necessary, but I really doubt it.
As things stand, there's a difference between purchasing for personal consumption, and for publishing. That's been standing, for a very long time. It might be as old as copyright itself.
Just because you own the game, doesn't mean you have the rights to use it in more than a personal setting. That's basically always been the case. You bought a personal license, not a broadcasting one.
The main reason for not attacking such things in the past was that it was a wasted effort at control. Too small a target, requiring too much effort. Automation, through things like audio recognition, changes that.
We've had the capability to detect audio for a long time. What changed suddenly in the last few years to deploy/enforce this at scale? Certainly not any improvements to detection. I've made a whopping total of $46 in something like 12 years on these platforms. Something tells me this level of enforcement is ridiculous and against the spirit of the law, and I'm certainly not an expert on the DMCA or a lawyer, but I'd be willing to wager a lot that this strict interpretation is misinterpreted. No one is submitting any takedown requests to this content, which to be clear, averages like 1.3 viewers and has less than a few thousand follwers. And when I describe in-game audio - I mean literal 2-3 second song clips like "barbie girl" song happening when you score a goal in rocket league will get your VOD DMCA'd and you can't upload it to YT. That is a newer thing. You really can't view the last 20 years of DRM and the way it's played out, and say something like "this is how it's always been, now automation." That doesn't add up.
Someone invented a system that makes it trivial for bottom feeding lawyer types to send frivolous notices. They feel like they've accomplished something.
That's the long and short of it. It suddenly became trivial to do and the consequences won't be apparent for quite some time, so there are no consequences as far as the lawyers and accountants are concerned.
A modest proposal: sell "streamer" licenses for a game that include audio/video watermarking features, or require an active internet connection and redisplay a sequence of numbers like a security key over the corner of the screen. Any footage without this would be taken down automatically.
Publishers could charge upwards of $200 for these. Larger publishers could offer package subscription deals for you to be able to stream content from their games.
Some governments [0] and IP holders [1] already offer this.
There's some back and forth about the exact underlying licensing, without an industry standard just yet - free streams are sometimes exempt, or require a partial license.
My guess as to why it's necessary to nuke all potentially copyright audio is that the platform is liable for infringement, and as a result they have a policy to shoot first and ask questions later. This is justified because in overwhelming majority of cases the streamer does not have a license for the audio.
In the case that the copyright audio is coming from a game, there is no way currently for the platform to automatically verify that you have a license or not, so once again they shoot first, ask question later.
This is unfortunate, but as usual, bad actors ruin the commons for everyone.
> This is justified because in overwhelming majority of cases the streamer does not have a license for the audio
I guess my point is that this arrangement was fine for a very, very long time. Why is it suddenly not fine in the last handful of years? Who is standing to gain here? In my view, it hurts the very platforms and industries this is trying to "protect." Twitch/YT/etc. are harmed because the content will be inherently worse, and copyright audio IP is hurt because it will spread to fewer listeners. Not only this, but if it were available to me, I actually would pay to license the audio I use, but there is no mechanism to do that!
A similar dumb thing happened a few years ago with the PGA tour - they decided that anyone re-posting PGA clips without their permission, even if it was for commentary/parody/etc., was all of a sudden not permissible. So, all the golf content on IG/TikTok/etc got catastrophically worse overnight, and PGA (which struggles with viewership, especially young viewers) gets less free exposure. There's absolutely no way this was a positive outcome for anyone involved, so why?
It was fine until recently. Crossposting another reply:
> We've had the capability to detect audio for a long time. What changed suddenly in the last few years to deploy/enforce this at scale? Certainly not any improvements to detection. I've made a whopping total of $46 in something like 12 years on these platforms. Something tells me this level of enforcement is ridiculous and against the spirit of the law, and I'm certainly not an expert on the DMCA or a lawyer, but I'd be willing to wager a lot that this strict interpretation is misinterpreted. No one is submitting any takedown requests to this content, which to be clear, averages like 1.3 viewers and has less than a few thousand follwers. And when I describe in-game audio - I mean literal 2-3 second song clips like "barbie girl" song happening when you score a goal in rocket league will get your VOD DMCA'd and you can't upload it to YT. That is a newer thing. You really can't view the last 20 years of DRM and the way it's played out, and say something like "this is how it's always been, now automation." That doesn't add up.
I'm not exactly a big fish here. I don't make money. There is no takedown request, nor would there ever be, because it's silly.
Again, the absence of a negative consequence at the time cannot be used as evidence something was actually fine to do, only that it was possible to get away with. That's regardless of whether it was actually truly fine or not.
If a new automated speed camera catches you on a road you've been speeding on for 7 years it doesn't mean speeding used to be fine it means you'll now receive consequences for doing things which were never fine to do! It also doesn't mean the speed limit always used to be the current value or anything like that. This is because "when regular enforcement began" has no causal relation one way or the other about what used to be fine or whether that was different than what's fine now. It is only an effect, one where "what was fine changed" is only one possible cause.
I don’t think you understand how the DMCA works or what it was intended to do - again, these are not takedown requests, as is the normal mechanism here, which there are guidelines for - this is platforms preemptively deciding for potential dmca takedown requests to takedown/censor content. If your position is that every single piece of content should never be hosted in fair use online, that is not only not how copyright law works, it’s not how the DMCA works, and I’m not sure how to progress this discussion further since we seem to have a fundamentally different understanding of how the law works, or what this thread is even about.
To trivially prove your point wrong - I actually do have the right under fair use to make content of my own with copyrighted material. This has literally always been ok. Platforms are taking these actions to protect themselves from potentially hosting copyrighted content on their platform that would not consistute fair uses, and since I, a user of their platform, have to abide by their policies, it's their decision. Assuming we are now on the same page here, continuing your speeding ticket example - this is not so much like that, as getting pulled over in a labeled 40 zone and the cop goes "well, we didnt know if you'd be breaking the law later or before this, so just to be safe, here you go" or, "actually that's not really the speed limit." take your choice here, they both apply.
My comment isn't in regards to how the DMCA is supposed to work or what content I'd like to restrict from hosting online. If you've gone that far you've already long passed my point and seriously misinterpreted my opening statement "As much as I don't like the current rules either".
As the other commenter mentioned, my point was having done something for many years does without receiving a notice does not inherently imply it was fine to do all those years prior. That does not mean I agree that's how large hosting platforms should work, just that their stance has always been "fuck what the user should be able to easily do with content" rather than some new policy the day you got your first notice.
You can just ignore the DMCA claims, but your service providers cannot, at least not without the risk of assuming legal liability themselves.
Also, cynical as it may sound, I assume the rise of a popular, successful peer-to-peer YouTube alternative would, in the US at least, result in the passage of even more consumer-hostile legislation, think "three strikes"-style anti-torrent laws with actual teeth (e.g., rather than requiring ISPs to make mostly idle threats to cut off Internet service against their own interests, imagine if ISPs were instead empowered to collect fines resulting from default judgements against repeat infringers, with a percentage of each fine collected paid to the ISP).
"Service providers" are in a very unequal situation here, with very different rights and liabilities, if you meant grouping ISPs (net neutrality) and platforms together.
And I don't care about the USA at this point, they made their bed, now let them lie in it, in fact the more they squeeze their fist, the sooner the free world will get the courage to dump them.
I once recorded an half-hour drive and uploaded it to YT as private video for my own convenience. Got immediately a copyright claim about radio playing some music in the background.
There are games which, via menu settings, allow you to disable dmca‘ed music for the purpose of streaming and uploading your plays.
Control is a game that has this iirc.
