San Francisco, Nov 12 (IANS): Twitch has asked users to stop using recorded music on their stream to avoid content removal, even though the Amazon-owned game-streaming service apologised to the creators for the way it dealt with a copyright crackdown last month.
"Creators, we hear you. Your frustration and confusion with recent music-related copyright issues is completely justified. Things can-and should-be better for creators than they have been recently," Twitch said in a blog post on Wednesday.
The comments came after Twitch last month sent a warning email about copyright infringement.
"We hear your feedback about how frustratingly little information we provided, and we should have made that warning email a lot more informative and helpful," Twitch said.
The issue revolved around compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- a set of US laws that allows users to create and share content on digital service providers like Twitch.
Part of complying means that when a copyright holder thinks a streamer has used their content without permission, they can request the content to be taken down.
When Twitch receives a DMCA notification, it processes the notification in accordance with its DMCA Guidelines. This includes removing the content, sharing the details with the channel owner, and tracking the allegation.
However, until May of this year, streamers received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications each year on Twitch.
Beginning in May, representatives for the major record labels started sending thousands of DMCA notifications each week that targeted creators' archives, mostly for snippets of tracks in years-old clips.
"We continue to receive large batches of notifications, and we don't expect that to slow down," Twitch said.
This means if creators play recorded music on their stream, they need to stop doing that.
They also need to review old videos and clips that may have recorded music in them and delete any archives that might.
Twitch said that one of the mistakes it made was not building adequate tools to allow creators to manage their own VOD and clip libraries.
"You're rightly upset that the only option we provided was a mass deletion tool for Clips, and that we only gave you three-days notice to use this tool. We could have developed more sophisticated, user-friendly tools awhile ago. That we didn't is on us," Twitch said.
"And we could have provided creators with a longer time period to address their VOD and Clip libraries -- that was a miss as well. We're truly sorry for these mistakes, and we'll do better," it added.