Twitch Marketing Promo Over Golden Emoji Goes Horribly Wrong After DMCA Nuclear Strike
from the not-the-time dept
Mere days ago, we discussed the bonkers path Twitch chose for itself in dealing with a flood of DMCA takedowns issued by the RIAA. The whole episode screamed of panic. Rather than dealing with DMCA takedowns via the normal method -- taking down the content, providing the content maker with a path for a counternotice, and then putting the content back if no lawsuit was filed -- , Twitch, instead, took the extraordinary action of simply and permanently nuking the videos in question. It then, rather brazenly, informed the content maker it had done so and advised them to "learn about copyright law." In fact, given its actions, there is some question as to whether or not this is all enough to have lost Twitch its safe harbor protections.
Regardless, it would be an understatement to suggest that this pissed off the Twitch community. The public backlash was both swift and severe, with content producers openly wondering if it was time to march off to a different platform entirely. Well, the very next day, Twitch began teasing a new offering coming in November and promoted this tease by releasing a sought after emote to all Twitch users.
Yesterday, Twitch took to teasing something that’s happening on November 14 (likely a digital convention called GlitchCon), as though everything is right as rain and not a corporate-friendly garbage fire. Twitch tweeted out a video that said “There’s a place where all Kappas are golden” and then temporarily turned all Kappa emotes gold.
For perhaps as long as Twitch has existed, there has been a myth: On exceedingly rare occasions, if the stars align perfectly, the ever-popular “Kappa” chat emote will turn gold. Some have suggested that a single Twitch user receives golden Kappa abilities every 24 hours. Others believe you have to fulfill highly specific prerequisites in order to unlock it. Yesterday, out of the blue, Twitch gave it to everybody. Twitch streamers and viewers, in turn, did not give a shit, because they were too busy recovering from the DMCApocalypse.
It was actually worse than streamers and users not giving a shit. This fully angered people, given Twitch's actions merely hours earlier. Streamers ran to Twitter and elsewhere to congratulate Twitch on its completely tone-deaf attempt to win over users with an emote, while others noted that Twitch had some serious communicating to do with the community and "shiny emotes" ought not have been on the agenda. Others once again wondered allowed if Twitch was the right platform on which to stream.
“Twitch gets slammed by the music industry, meanwhile they changed all the Kappas to gold, maybe in the hopes we all forget about how terribly the company has been running,” said Rocket League pro Lethamyr. “I think it’s nearly time to stream live on YouTube.”
And its not as though Twitch's extreme actions have even gotten the RIAA and its comrades off of the platform's back. Instead, various industry groups released a letter still complaining that Twitch wasn't doing enough on the copyright front and was mismanaging its Soundtrack by Twitch feature, which is supposed to help streamers use authorized music.
In other words, in a world where Twitch was presented with the choice of siding with its own content creators and users, or the copyright industry associations, it took the bold step of managing to piss off everyone instead. That it thought that golden emojis would somehow either stave off criticism of the platform, or at least be received without this resulting anger, seems to indicate that there are some very out of touch folks running this company at the moment.
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Filed Under: copyright, dmca, golden emoji, marketing stunts
Companies: twitch
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Kipling had it right, all these decades ago. "If once you have paid him the dane-geld, you'll never get rid of the Dane." The only appropriate response to a demand for appeasement is a quick, hard punch square in the face.
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If only someone had done that to Donald Trump once in his wretched life…
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Just relex.
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'Here's a shiny emoji for the reaming you got, scurry off now'
And its not as though Twitch's extreme actions have even gotten the RIAA and its comrades off of the platform's back. Instead, various industry groups released a letter still complaining that Twitch wasn't doing enough on the copyright front and was mismanaging its Soundtrack by Twitch feature, which is supposed to help streamers use authorized music.
If only there had been ample historical precedence that would have made crystal clear that trying to appease the parasites merely gets thrown in your face alongside complaints that you still aren't doing enough...
As for the timing, I dearly hope the emoji thing had been planned before Twitch decided to screw a bunch of their creators over, because as bad a look as that would be it would still be so much better than trying to appease a rightly pissed off user base with something that pathetic and shallow.
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I find this really weird considering Twitch already has some sort of music detection where it mutes archived streams with copyrighted music or other content. Further, I find it really silly considering I've discovered several new artists from watching someone's stream.
The one instance of muting that I had to really roll my eyes at though was when someone did a "let's watch" stream of Night of the Living Dead and basically the entire stream was muted once archived for containing copyrighted material. The stream was literally just the movie and the streamers commentary. For those not aware, Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain. The streamer actually mentioned at the start of the stream that it was in the public domain which is why he knew what he was doing was legal.
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sp
"aloud", not "allowed".
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... a movie famous for being in the public domain and it gets muted anyway, just in case anyone didn't know how screwed up copyright makes things.
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Re: sp
I was wondering if anyone else had spotted that. That said, it helps if you cite the error to help the author find it.
Others once again wondered allowed if Twitch was the right platform on which to stream.
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Re: 'Here's a shiny emoji for the reaming you got, scurry off no
This has to be an example of bad timing. Surely no one can be that tone-deaf and that stupid to think the people are as dumb as turkeys and will completely forget just because you dangle something shiny at them.
I'd be royally po'd as the developer if the feature I worked on was being used as such a bs appeasement approach.
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There's no compelling evidence that (satisfying) violence is an effective disciplinary measure for everyone.
Also: I suspect that person can not be disciplined, because it lacks the capacity to recognize any patterns in it's own behavior.
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Kappa? Really?
Given that the Kappa emote is typically used to convey sarcasm or irony, or to troll people online, Twitch making an announcement involving said emote just after doing mass video takedowns (and telling those affected to "go learn about copyright law" as if it's the creators' fault) feels like an even bigger insult than it already was.
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Re: Re: sp
That's how I would of done it.
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I'm sure there was a point where punishing rather than rewarding the negative behaviour would have at least avoided the world's current situation. While he would still have been a sociopathic, narcissist obsessed with profit over human rights, he may have done somewhat less damage if he weren't allowed to believe that he would always get away with things.
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I'd love it if a false copyright claim against public domain material was treated the same as if the guy had decided to stream Tenet. Alas...
This is a great example of why the current copyright system is broken - the public's rights are secondary to those of corporations, even though the very idea of copyright is that the public grant a temporary exception to the public domain.
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Even better - NOTLD is a great example of why they decided to screw up copyright to the degree it has been. That is, IIRC, the movie was not deliberately placed into the public domain. It was accidentally placed there due to a mistake when registering the copyright.
So, while the public benefitted massively from the movie having become a perennial classic due to its status getting it played constantly on TV, spawning a massive industry of imitators and and entire new subgenre that's earned billions in the intervening years, someone somewhere missed out on some money on its initial release. So, the law was changed to automatically register copyrights, avoiding the possibility for this kind of mistake to happen again, but dooming many orphaned works to obscurity.
That's not to say that NOTLD was the reason for the copyright change, it's just a fantastic example of culture benefitting the world that cannot happen legally with the current regime.
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Well, yeah. At this point in time there's no longer any excuse for platforms to assume that any DMCA notice is made in good faith. Not when there are thousands of bogus notices for every legitimate one.
So anyone not stonewalling the copyright cult to the fullest extent of their capability will be paying for that later on. And I'm not sure Geigner managed to properly convey the reason Twitch is now up shit creek; Next time the copyright cult wants to send a hundred thousand C&D's their way there is now precedent that Twitch's actual policy is to nuke everything at first allegation, no questions asked. That's now the conditional requirement of their safe harbor.
No one's going to want to use twitch under circumstances where everything they put up can be removed without questions as long as any DMCA generated by a bot or active malfeasance targets them, and twitch will now find it hard to change that method unless they want to be Cox v2 and find themselves in front of a judge establishing they are in violation of their own policy and thus absent safe harbor protection.
I don't get it. When did "The customer is King" turn into "The customer, our toilet"?
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"I don't get it. When did "The customer is King" turn into "The customer, our toilet"?"
The former applies when they're trying to compete and sensible companies understand that quality service is as important as, and sometimes more important than, low prices and quality products.
The latter is what happens when they get into a position where they know that customers will stick around even if they're treated like crap, be that because of a lack of competition or other market forces.
You also have to understand that on a free service, the actual customer is often not the streamer nor the viewer.
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Re: 'Here's a shiny emoji for the reaming you got, scurry off no
"If only there had been ample historical precedence that would have made crystal clear that trying to appease the parasites merely gets thrown in your face alongside complaints that you still aren't doing enough..."
That's what I simply don't understand either. You can't appease the bully - not in the schoolyard, not as an adult, not in private or professional life. Everyone knows this.
So if you do business in the US and someone demands you do something at the threat of a lawsuit then you need to have your legal team telling you to stonewall until you aren't the guy bending over and dropping his trousers every time the bully grins and theatrically drops a bar of soap.
Because if you become known as the soft target you might as well change your name and leave. That's true even when all it concerns is the neighborhood gang of thugs. It's even more so when you run your business out of a cage filled with copyright-trolling Liebowitz clones.
And this doesn't get better when - as a platform allowing artists to self-publish - you should know damn well that your very existence is the biggest threat in existence to the business model of the incumbent middlemen still barely holding on to their place at the top.
When you know the end goal of the thug is to see you six feet under the only thing appeasement will do is to enable him easier access to your throat.
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Oh!!!!. Golden KAPPA
I though it was the Golden Krappa. 💩
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"This is a great example of why copyright is broken..."
Fixed that for you, Paul. There is no baby to accidentally throw out with this "bathwater" composed of putrescent medieval blasphemy law given a new name.
Copyright as a concept has no moral or ethical validity, period. The more liberal versions of Creative Commons are, in reality, already the end of the envelope as far as what humans can accept concerns.
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Well, the issue for me here is that there are always bad actors who wish to screw actual artists over for profit. If everything is public domain that sounds good, until you have corporations taking whatever they wish without credit or payment to the original author. Which is one reason why the original concept of copyright exists - artists were getting ripped off to such a degree they were disincentivised from creating or publicising new works. It's been changed and corrupted far past that original goal, but the problem it exists to mitigate still exists.
Sure, those corporations stand to lose a lot of monopolies and so on and the creative landscape would change. But as bad as the current situation is, it would be equally problematic for corporations to be able to make a fortune without needing to benefit the actual creators, and copyright is what currently forces them to do that to some degree (although of course they have many ways of avoiding some responsibility even now).
The system needs a massive review, and possible be killed and resurrected with better terms. But, not having any such thing in place would be almost as bad as having the current system for many independent artists.
"The more liberal versions of Creative Commons are, in reality, already the end of the envelope as far as what humans can accept concerns."
Yet, it also depends on the concept of copyright to a degree. Some form of copyright-style restriction still needs to exist if any CC licence beyond CC0 is to have any teeth to allow it to be enforced.
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Yeah, I get all that. Maybe I should clarify;
Twitch is indeed a platform, their revenue stream comes from third parties, not the streamers themselves.
But in order to generate that revenue they are utterly dependent on a given density and quality of streamers generating enough views.
And decapitating your own supply chain is insanity when, referencing your words, competition not only exists but the market is not stable. Twitch doesn't have the collateral pseudo lock-in of Google or Facebook, nor auxiliary services like Amazon's AWS.
Twitch has placed itself in the position of a chef who has been caught on camera letting passing thugs piss in his soup pot and stick up his customers. This seems like very good news for the hot dog vendor and ramen/kimchi stall right outside but far less so for the restaurant that chef owns and operates in.
Worse, to keep the analogy up and highlight the sheer insanity of copyright law, not only does the thug now know the chef is an easy mark, if the chef henceforth fights back the thugs can refer to the chef's established policy being to invite the thug to take a leak in his dishes without complaint and now the police won't let him stop doing that - lest he risk losing safe harbor - or the thug can take him for everything he has.
So far that is already a legal paradigm you really wouldn't want to operate him, but, back to the analogy again, imagine the chef had every reason to know, from the outset, that breaking him completely was the original end goal of those thugs.
So, uh, I'm still flabbergasted that large commercial entities exist who, knowing they are the anathema of the copyright cult, still choose to roll over and bare their throats in the vague hope the rabid wolf will go away after a quick nibble.
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Re: Re: Re: sp
Would "of" ...?
(Well, I assume you're being facetious here. Good job! Still...)
"have"
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"If everything is public domain that sounds good, until you have corporations taking whatever they wish without credit or payment to the original author. "
Yeah, that's a massive conflation though, between one natural right and a decidedly unnatural one.
In Sweden (and I think quite a few other EU member states) what is known as "copyright" is broken down in two specific mechanisms, loosely translated as; "Right of origin/paternity" and "Right to copy".
The former is that part which has the original author own the right to be acknowledged as author, meaning that if you rip off someone's work and put another name under it, or claim that you have the approval of that author to use that work, THAT is where the violation happens.
Respecting this is as inherently natural as respecting an identity or name. The only intended violation of this is the malicious one, and so the vast majority supports upholding it.
The second part which causes every mess we currently have with copyright is the "right to copy" which, in order to work at all, needs to infringe on very important principles of freedoms and property rights of everyone else.
That second part is identical to the old catholic church's blasphemy and heresy law where anyone quoting or interpreting scripture without holding a license from the vatican was considered a heretic to be forced to recant and/or burned at the stake. Later on formalized by Bloody Mary as part of her anti-protestant persecution regime, and finally re-cast as Queen Anne's statute. Violating this part of copyright is so easy it's actually hard not to do, and "malice" is inherently not part of copying and passing on information which is why only the malicious tend to respect it.
"Copyright" as we currently know it merges both these principles and has quite successfully conflated the second part as a necessary rider to the first...which it is not and never has been.
Copyright is information control. Like any other of the crude and casual violations of human rights it has no moral authority just because it's in the hands of private individuals rather than a government. That Erdogan could choose to use copyright as a mechanism to shut down social networks in Turkey without a single protest from the rest of the G20 is a very cold and hard warning about the dangers of allowing that law to stand.
"Which is one reason why the original concept of copyright exists - artists were getting ripped off to such a degree they were disincentivised from creating or publicising new works."
That's actual bullshit right there, but it's been peddled so often it's become "common knowledge". Most parts of europe have had extensive periods without copyright - and those periods correspond with some of the most inventive and creative periods of human history. Germany's 16th century explosion of culture comes to mind, as well as the rich eras of creation during the few times France wasn't under a protectionist regime.
The UK isn't the first to try to issue government-protected censorship law, it's just that one nation where such law wasn't summarily overturned before it had time to spread.
"Yet, it also depends on the concept of copyright to a degree."
CC is required because of copyright, not the other way around. The running rabbit isn't what causes the thunder.
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Twitch is becoming the next tumblr, but DMCA instead of NSFW
This is what they decided: To let all DMCA claims to take down content be a complete free-for-all https://torrentfreak.com/twitch-dmca-bloodbath-trades-copyright-strikes-for-due-process-201021/
Allo wing:
-Anonymous and secret takedowns
-No due process
-Censorship
This renders it pointless to even host your videos on there, if eventually it gets (wrongly) taken down by the copyright industry.
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Re: Twitch is becoming the next tumblr, but DMCA instead of NSFW
Also fuck the RIAA. It was instant karma they try to kill youtube-dl, but instead, resulted the AACS 09F9 streisand effect.
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Wrong, back in the day if you were a printer you needed new works to print, and would pay an author a reasonable amount for a manuscript. What copyright, as the statute of Anne was about, was managing the risk of the printers. When you print as many books as you think you can sell, before you sell the first copy, having someone produce copies of lesser quality, before you have something to sell can seriously damage the return from your investment in printing.
When you look at the history leading up to that statute, there were several attempts to get copyright as a publishers right that were rejected. The publishers then applied the spin of making it an authors right, in the full knowledge that all the author could do with that right was sell it to a publisher, (unless that is they owned a printing press, and had the time to manually set type, and print copies of their book).
Also, remember prior to printing there was no copyright, and for the first 300 years of printing, no authors copyright, just church or state permission for a publisher to produce and sell copies. Lack of authors copyright has never deterred people from creating new works.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
"But in order to generate that revenue they are utterly dependent on a given density and quality of streamers generating enough views."
They are, but they're also currently in a dominant position that allows them to get away with things. This may change in the near future, but recently Microsoft shut down their Mixer platform, Facebook streams haven't replaced it as a decent competitor as they suggested it would when they did that, and while some people use YouTube for similar things many people just use Twitch as their default go-to, whether that's as a streamer or viewer.
So, until that market landscape changes they can get away with a lot more than they would if they were actually fighting for customers on a daily basis. So, they much more incentive to keep advertisers and would-be litigators happy than they have for the users. Unless they go too far or have some major technical hiccup that leaves their service unreliable for a length of time, they can get away with this stuff.
"Twitch doesn't have the collateral pseudo lock-in of Google or Facebook"
Doesn't it? A quick search suggests that in 2019 they had 73% of the market, and the nearest competitor in the breakdown I had a glance at no longer exists (Mixer). While there is choice, people often default to Twitch, and the lack of switching when Mixer poached some of the dominant Twitch personalities suggests that many are reluctant to move.
"nor auxiliary services like Amazon's AWS."
Erm, I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to here in context, but you do know who owns Twitch, right?
"So, uh, I'm still flabbergasted that large commercial entities exist who, knowing they are the anathema of the copyright cult, still choose to roll over and bare their throats in the vague hope the rabid wolf will go away after a quick nibble."
Bear in mind the current landscape they're operating in. Twitch is absolutely built on things like section 230, fair use and other protections that these wolves are trying to dismantle. It makes more sense to play ball and hopefully end up in a position where they continue, than it is to fight them and not only spend huge amounts of time and money in court, but risk helping dismantle the very basis for their operation. Like with the YouTube cases - the court cases eventually dissipated because Google played ball. If they'd have kept fighting, all they would have needed was something like the Viacom case that wasn't based on laughable evidence to bring the entire sector down.
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Technically incorrect. NOTLD went under a different title before distribution — Night of the Flesh Eaters — but the Walter Reade Organization failed to replace the copyright notice visible on the title frames when it changed the title prior to distributing the film. Copyright law in 1968 required a copyright notice on a publicly disseminated work for someone to maintain its copyright. Since NOTLD lacked a copyright notice, it fell into the public domain, much to everyone’s benefit.
Also technically incorrect. Current U.S. copyright law automatically grants a copyright to any work in a fixed state or medium, but someone must still register the copyright. It isn’t technically required that someone do so, but it sure as hell helps to have that registered copyright on hand in case of possible legal disputes.
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"They are, but they're also currently in a dominant position that allows them to get away with things."
An absurdist position relying on some seriously broken logic. I mean, the reason they have so far held dominant position is because so far they haven't been utter garbage. Marketing hype will only take you so far when the people you piss off are "your community, as a whole". I realize full well they may be thinking they're Ma Bell, given their action here...I just can't understand why.
"...and while some people use YouTube for similar things many people just use Twitch as their default go-to, whether that's as a streamer or viewer."
Possibly because Youtube has proven difficult to work with over contentID and DMCA takedowns.
But what Twitch just did is just so much worse - and something I suspect their legal department may now be advising them has to continue for the sake of their safe harbor. It's now their demonstrated practice to nuke from orbit the second the DMCA calls.
"Unless they go too far or have some major technical hiccup that leaves their service unreliable for a length of time..."
See the Cox verdict and argument. Twitch has just acted to nuke a massive amount of streams based entirely on DMCA allegation. Either this is their policy - in which case to retain safe harbor they must continue to adhere to that policy...
...or it's not their policy in which case, as Geigner points out, they may lose safe harbor over violating their own policy.
THIS is the real whammy they just invited . I'm not sure to what extent Rightscorp is still operational but the very second Twitch pulled this stunt a thousand copyright trolls just came in their pants. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
"Doesn't it? A quick search suggests that in 2019 they had 73% of the market, and the nearest competitor in the breakdown I had a glance at no longer exists (Mixer)."
No, that only shows a heavy market share. Google and to some degree FB have an entire ecosystem around their google accounts making it very convenient to use that one login to access your personalized version of google play, youtube, gmail, maps, etc etc. There's a soft incentive to use google for all your needs because it's so damn convenient. For the hard lock-in of course, see Oracle.
"Erm, I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to here in context, but you do know who owns Twitch, right?"
I refer to the part of the business Twitch may just have sunk being, in fact, the main part of their business. Amazon's AWS has grown to the point where the online retail might almost just be the brand logo and a lot of inconvenient labor union hassles as far as Bezos is concerned. Twitch doesn't have a secondary revenue source to fall back on to make up for the primary one potentially running right into the ground.
"It makes more sense to play ball and hopefully end up in a position where they continue..."
But that's just the point. Everyone who played ball with those wolves ended up increasingly pressured or gone. It's become pretty damn clear that if you give the copyright cult a minute of your time they will spend that minute to trying to punch you. If you turn the other cheek they hit you again, or kick you in the nuts.
Twitch, as a platform which allows self-publishing, is one of those things the incumbent giants want gone, for good. And that's been made so clear by now that it's almost impossible for anyone running an online service today to be unaware of it.
The only way to rationalize this would be if Twitch's XO's know they've got other jobs lined up so what happens a year from now is someone else's business as long as they can fend the rabid wolf off for that long.
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while not a record, 2min to turn a conversation political is sadly impressive.
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Re: Re: 'Here's a shiny emoji for the reaming you got, scurry of
Always bet on stupidity.
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Meh. Don't be impressed by SJWs trolling up the conversation and trying to make everything somehow be about their favorite issue. Just be disgusted by it. Hit the spam flag on their spam, then ignore and move on.
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Thank you for proving, in three letters, that nobody should pay attention to you.
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"I mean, the reason they have so far held dominant position is because so far they haven't been utter garbage"
Maybe part of it, but they were also pioneers in the space, with a big following when they spun off from justin.tv. That doesn't always work, but there's something to be said for being an early pioneer that becomes synonymous with the market they're in.
"No, that only shows a heavy market share"
...which can mean that people default to using them even if there's a better choice out there. This is essentially the same point we're arguing in the section 230 threads - it's not enough that competition exists, people have to opt to use them. If people sit around whining that Twitter are being mean because they block the people the like, rather than using a different site that operates in the way they want, nothing will change. Same here - however bad you think Twitch are acting, they're counting on people grumbling and sticking around.
"Twitch has just acted to nuke a massive amount of streams based entirely on DMCA allegation"
Yes... and it's down to the market how they respond to that. If Twitch users shrug their shoulder and carry on using Twitch as their management is apparently counting on, it means nothing.
"It's become pretty damn clear that if you give the copyright cult a minute of your time they will spend that minute to trying to punch you."
It's also clear that if you play hard ball, they try to get legal precedent to not only shut you down, but your entire business sector.
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Is the carcass Twitching?
When gold is rare, everyone wants it. When everyone has it...who cares?
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Throw a rock into a pack of dogs, and the one who yelps is the one that got hit.
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It's also clear that if you play hard ball, they try to get legal precedent to not only shut you down, but your entire business sector.
Given they are already doing that though the smart move is to at least make them work for it and not make it easy by trying to appease them.
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'Death by a thousand cuts' when you're looking at one at a time
Though I can't say for sure I suspect a lot of that is due to the short-term thinking that infects the economy these days, wherein long-term gains are given less weight than short-term gains because all that people pay attention to is how much you're making right now.
Sure the appeasement route may cost you more(potentially everything) long-term but it's quicker and cheaper to just give the copyright extortionists what they want right now so they'll go away for a bit, with the fact that doing so paints a huge target on your back a problem for future people.
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What seems to be funny.
It that bars and small locations and even Stadiums PAY a monthly fee to cover ANY/ALL chances of music or what ever being used IN the venue, when music is being played.
Why isnt this a THING? Or is the music/movie industry NOT willing to give that consesion? OR Are they willing But also willing to CHARGE huge fee's? Beyond what a local Bar/stadium pays?
Isnt this like the problem Sat radio had? and took a few years to get things ironed out? Even Apple itunes got hit.
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Throw a rock into a pack of dogs and you’re an animal abuser, regardless of which one yelps.
You sick fuck.
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No legal precedent is being created via this method.
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Twitch is hanging by a thread. the top 30 streamers are all prepping to leave entirely, but are being held by legal obligations.
Once those go, Twitch is pretty much a graveyard.
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Wait til something like 4Chan sees this and basically DMCA's every single video twitch ever made.....
refusal to destroy the video, they've lost 230 protection for everything.
DO it, and twitch dies as content creators all leave.
Either way Twitch is a doomed platform due to it's own behaviour.....
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Perhaps, but if they're giving in to the parasites then no legal precedent is needed. Fight and you might win, give up from the start and you've ensured your loss.
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"Twitch is hanging by a thread. the top 30 streamers are all prepping to leave entirely, but are being held by legal obligations."
Do you have a source on that?
"Once those go, Twitch is pretty much a graveyard."
Do you have a source to prove that the other hundreds of thousands of streamers bring in zero traffic or revenue?
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I disagree. Give in to some demands and you're not in the best position, but it's one that can be recovered from - look at YouTube and where they went from being swamped by lawsuits to all major record labels switching to use YouTube exclusively instead of their own bespoke platforms, which they shut down after realising they're better to play ball with YouTube.
Compare that to how the situation would have been if they kept having to fight Viacom-style lawsuits, only they eventually managed to file one with actual evidence of wrongdoing and the court ruled that a fundamental part of YouTube's business model was illegal.
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How much of Youtube's success and ability to survive was due to being bought out by a company with piles of money to spend though, such that they could no longer just sue it into oblivion and had to look for easier targets? It's one thing to go after a small company where you can just outspend them such that they have to fold, like what happened with Vimeo, another thing entirely to go after one backed by a company that's got more money than you do.
Regarding the 'not the best but recoverable' idea while the parasites seem to have dropped the direct attacks even now they're still trying to kill the platform via laws to impose liability, so it's questionable how much they really gained from trying the appeasement route other than maybe some breathing room, given as far as I can tell the only 'thanks' Google/Youtube gets is whining that they've shown that they can take down copyrighted works so they should be required to do even more.
As SDM noted when you're dealing with a group that sees your product/platform as an existential threat and therefore something that needs to be destroyed you're not dealing with someone who is going to be willing to compromise and leave you be if you just give them 'enough', because they want you gone or effectively under their control and will accept nothing less.
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How hard can it be?
To me it seems like a really simple situation. The music industry doesn't want people to play their music, so people should not play it. Don't buy it, don't listen to it, don't give them the free popularity, phase it out of existence.
There are numerous free music sources, where artists will be very happy if their song gets played. Jamendo, Bandcamp and many others. Just pay attention to licensing, give credit when the license requires it, etc and everybody will be happy.
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"How much of Youtube's success and ability to survive was due to being bought out by a company with piles of money to spend though"
Any legal precedent would affect them as much as smaller sites. If their business model is found to be fundamentally illegal, they would be able to fight to get the judgement overturned or change their business model far easier for smaller sites, but they can't buy their way out of brazenly breaking the law with a fundamental aspect of their business. They would remain the highest profile target, but now with actual legal weight and repercussions.
Same thing here with Twitch - sure, Amazon can certainly afford to fight off endless frivolous lawsuits, but the risk of a bad judgement is there and they will prefer to avoid them.
"as far as I can tell the only 'thanks' Google/Youtube gets is whining that they've shown that they can take down copyrighted works so they should be required to do even more."
This is a very different problem. It's bad for the users of the site, but as long as people still default to using YouTube despite those issues, it's preferable to YouTube than fighting constant court battles with a risk of damaging the way their income is provided.
Nothing will actually appease the people attacking them - if they did somehow do something to get YouTube shut down, they will then whine about all the income they lost - but from the POV of these sites they are happier fighting constant false DMCA claims with no risk of damaging their overall business than they are with the alternative.
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"It's also clear that if you play hard ball, they try to get legal precedent to not only shut you down, but your entire business sector."
True enough, but here's the thing - survivors among those playing hardball exist. The same can't be said about those who caved. Witness Cox for a prima speciae example of that.
And that goes twice when twitch has - in this case - painted themselves into a risky legal corner where their options seem to be which entity they open themselves to lawsuits from.
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"No legal precedent is being created via this method."
Remember the safe harbor provisions, and COX?
If a judge sympathetic to the copyright cult chooses to view Twitch's nuking of accounts on allegations only as "policy" they're in for it.
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There's always that poignant "what if". What if someone had punched Trump in the face every time he tried to weasel his way into a deal by lying his ass off. What if Hitler had gotten into that art college. What if Caligula had been quietly eviscerated by the soldiers he followed around as a young lad.
Doesn't do us much good today. It is what it is. And as it has been for thousands of years this is just yet one more reminder that deplorable behavior needs to be penalized rather than rewarded by the starstruck admiration of the ignorant sheep.
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" Give in to some demands and you're not in the best position, but it's one that can be recovered from..."
Assuming that giving in doesn't actually further their goal. A I keep saying, the Cox verdict already has a legal precedent that safe harbor relies on adhering to a set policy;
If Twitch admits nuking accounts on mere allegation is their policy then they are done for as a company. A single DMCA bot can suppress them completely.
If nuking accounts on allegation isn't their policy then there's a good chance they've lost safe harbor and will get sued into oblivion.
In this particular case not fighting is the worst possible option.
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"Sure the appeasement route may cost you more(potentially everything) long-term but it's quicker and cheaper to just give the copyright extortionists what they want right now so they'll go away for a bit..."
Yeah, but the potential cost. I keep bringing up the Cox verdict. There's legal precedent on the books that deviating from a set policy on infringers can cost you safe harbor completely.
So either Twitch nukes any account on unfounded allegation as policy. In that case stick a fork in them, they're done.
Or they claim that's not their policy - in that case Judge O'Grady will be happy to declare their safe harbor gone. In that case stick a fork in them, they're done.
This isn't appeasing the copyright cult. It's putting up a noose, sticking your head in it, and kicking away the chair.
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"Yeah, but the potential cost. I keep bringing up the Cox verdict"
This is why I keep bringing up precedent as well. A bad (for users) company policy on the part of Twitch or YouTube is not particularly great, but whatever they decide is essentially restricted to their own platform and the risk is really just a question of how long users put up with that rather than actually get off their arses and use competitors. It also keeps them as the high profile targets that gets most of the attention of would-be attackers, with the risk that if the attackers escalate then the big boys might step in to prevent precedent.
A bad legal precedent affects everybody, and they may just decide to start going after some lower hanging fruit once there's an easy legal route that could be used to extort other platforms without them having the resources to refer to a higher court.
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