Twitch, Others, Ban Amouranth Yet Again, Once Again With Zero Transparency

from the how-is-this-so-hard? dept

Regular readers here will by now likely be familiar with Twitch streamer "Amouranth". She has made it onto our pages as part of the year-long mess that Amazon's Twitch platform appears to be making for itself, during which it has demonstrated its willingness to both treat its creative community quite poorly and fail to properly communicate that poor treatment to much of anyone at all. For instance, Twitch has temporarily banned or kept Amouranth from live-streaming several times, all likely due to the content of her streams. That content seems nearly perfectly designed to poke the line on Twitch's streaming guidelines, including so-called "hot tub streaming" and ASMR streams. Twitch has never been great about explaining the reasons for bans like these, but in the past it has at least linked to the offending content so that a streamer knows which videos were objectionable. But with some, including Amouranth, Twitch often times doesn't even bother doing that, such as when it demonetized Amouranth's videos without warning or explanation.

So, while Twitch, quite frankly, now has far, far bigger issues on its hands, it's worth pointing out that Twitch has yet again banned Amouranth without warning or explanation. Though, it appears this time Twitch has some friends tagging along in Instagram and TikTok.

Popular streamer Kaitlyn ‘Amouranth’ Siragusa has had Twitch channel, TikTok, and Instagram pages banned within quick succession, but what actually happened and what is she doing next? On October 8, Amouranth received her fifth ban from Twitch but it seemed to come pretty out of the blue. While there is usually a clip to point to that mostly explains the suspension, that hasn’t been the case this time around and the exact reason is up for speculation.

And not just speculation by the public. It appears that at the time the ban-hammer was brought down on her, Amouranth had absolutely no idea why she'd been banned across multiple platforms. Perhaps she's playing coy, but publicly she actually asked others to let her know if they found out the reason for all of this.

Why Twitch can't seem to get communication and basic public relations right is an ongoing mystery. But whatever that reason is, it seems like they just can't. The wrinkle here would normally be that Instagram and TikTok have followed along the same path... except that Twitch actually reinstated Amouranth a few days later. She remains banned on the other platforms, though, making this all remarkably strange. Ban, unban, ban, unban, and all without proper communication to a member of Twitch's creative community.

Now, Amouranth will be fine. She makes most of her money from OnlyFans, after all. But that really isn't the point. How much harm Twitch is doing to creators by not bothering to communicate with them isn't as important as why any of this harm is occurring at all.

If that keeps up, she may never have to make a return to streaming. Though, YouTube could be an option seeing as Indiefoxx – who was in a similar situation to Amouranth with being banned – has recently made the switch herself.

She’s also talked about starting a venture capital fund that focuses on the “grey market space” of things that are not entirely brand-friendly. Though, who knows if that’ll happen anytime soon.

And, while Amouranth is a very visible creative whom this is happening to, there are plenty of others. And at some point, those people are not going to put up with this concept of a platform being managed by whim any longer.

Filed Under: amouranth, asmr, content moderation, hot tub streaming, streaming
Companies: amazon, twitch

Perfect Timing: Twitch Gets Compromised With Voluminous Leak Of Data Via Torrent

from the here-we-go-again dept

It's no secret that Amazon-owned Twitch has had a rough go of it for the past year or so. We've talked about most, if not all, of the issues the platform has created for itself: a DMCA apocalypse, a creative community angry about not being informed over copyright issues, unclear creator guidelines for content that result in punishment from Twitch while some creators happily test the fences on those guidelines, and further and ongoing communication breakdowns with creators. All of that, mind you, has taken place over the last 12 months. It's been bad. Really bad!

But great news: now it's even worse! Someone managed to get into the Twitch platform and leak it. As in pretty much all of it. And even some information on a Steam-rival Amazon is planning to release. Seriously.

An anonymous hacker claims to have leaked the entirety of Twitch, including its source code and user payout information.

The user posted a 125GB torrent link to 4chan on Wednesday, stating that the leak was intended to “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space” because “their community is a disgusting toxic cesspool”.

The leaked Twitch data reportedly includes:

-The entirety of Twitch’s source code with comment history “going back to its early beginnings”

-Creator payout reports from 2019

-Mobile, desktop and console Twitch clients

-Proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch

-“Every other property that Twitch owns” including IGDB and CurseForge

-An unreleased Steam competitor, codenamed Vapor, from Amazon Game Studios

-Twitch internal ‘red teaming’ tools (designed to improve security by having staff pretend to be hackers)

As you can see, yeah, pretty much everything. And keep in mind that whoever leaked this via torrent has noted that this is "part 1". Now, while a great deal of attention is being paid to Vapor, an unreleased platform created by Amazon to compete with Steam, let's focus instead on the release of the financial compensation for Twitch creators. Because this represents yet another failure by Twitch to protect its own creative community.

How detailed are these financial records. Extremely, as it turns out, with names and dollar amounts attached so that enterprising individuals are able to rank them. For instance, my own beloved Critical Role appears to be the top Twitch earner since 2019.

Now, I love Critical Role and am quite pleased that they're doing so well for themselves. But I'm pretty sure they also aren't loving their exact compensation through Twitch being out there for the entire world to see. I need to avoid getting into a victim-blaming issue here, since Twitch is very much a victim of this hack/compromise/leak... but we also don't have details from Amazon as to how this leak occurred, only that it is authentic. The next question is obvious: did Twitch do something stupid that left itself vulnerable to this sort of thing?

We don't know. But this is the problem when a platform torches its reputation among its own creative like Twitch has over the last year or so. There's no goodwill in the bank for Twitch to rely on as it navigates through the fallout of all this. And, while it's worth noting that the person posting this leak claims they did so out of anger with how Twitch operates and its "toxic cesspool" of a community, the public and media framing of this leak has shown little sympathy for the platform overall.

This all comes at a time of much tribulation for Twitch, with the #DoBetterTwitch/#TwitchDoBetter hashtags at the forefront of efforts by users to demand a better service from the platform, including boycotts to demand action over hate raids. Twitch seems to be making some positive moves, but then always finds a way to do something terrible too.

If Twitch wants to start repairing this reputation, it should be in full "good PR" mode: admit what happened, be transparent, do not talk about other great things you've done, build a plan to repair this. Sadly, given Twitch's history, it's an open question whether it will do the right thing or not.

Filed Under: data leak, live streamers
Companies: amazon, twitch

Twitch Finally Gets Around To Letting Banned Streamers Know Why They Were Banned

from the victory! dept

We've covered Twitch's no good, very bad time for many months now, which should give you an indication just how bad this time has been. If you need a brief background, the major points of contention have been the Amazon-owned company having a laughably one-sided approach to DMCA takedowns of content, its complete inept method for temp-banning its own creative community over copyright claims, and its totally vague approach to banning creators over various rule-breaking when it comes to Twitch's indecipherable guidelines and the capricious manner in which it applies them.

While all of it is frankly bad, the lowest hanging fruit in all of this has always been the lack of communication Twitch has offered its own creative community when it comes to bans, copyright issues, or guidelines. For instance, Twitch, at first, would just disappear content, with little or no notice to the streamer who authored it. When it has given any notice to creators, that notice has traditionally been so devoid of any details so as to be entirely useless. Which I suppose is why the recent announcement by Twitch that it will finally tell streamers who have been hit with a copyright takedown what that infringing content is... is good?

The days of Twitch mysteriously suspending popular streamers are coming to an end. The Amazon-owned streaming platform announced yesterday that it will now actually tell streamers who get temporarily banned why they’ve been punished. It only took 10 years, folks.

“As of today, enforcement notifications sent to suspended users will include the name of the content and the date of the violation to ensure they have better clarity about what content is being actioned on,” Twitch Support wrote on Twitter. Based on a sample screenshot, these new explanations will include what the streamer did that violated Twitch’s Terms of Service or Community Guidelines and which stream it happened on.

So, again, this is a good thing, except, as the opening Kotaku graf hints, this announcement also highlights the absurdity of Twitch not having been doing this the entire time. And this should really also callout the minimalist nature of the "infringement" in question, which oftentimes involves video game audio assets that are part of a Twitch stream, or background music and whatnot. In other words, the need for this level of detail, though definitely crucial, also should let you know that these streamers aren't trying to infringe copyright. If they were, there wouldn't be so much confusion over why they were being banned or having their content taken down.

All of this certainly isn't lost on the very community Twitch is now trying to placate.

Twitch was founded back in 2011 and later acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly $1 billion. It’s a big business, but only because of the content put there by others. Telling creators why they’ve been occasionally locked out of what is for some a defacto job is the least Twitch could do, though still far from what a lot of users would ideally like. Even now Twitch Support’s announcement tweet for the ban explanations is littered with complaints about the lack of transparency and communication around things like the appeals process.

In other words, now that Twitch has gotten things to where they probably should have been at the jump, the real work to win back its community begins.

Filed Under: content moderation, copyright, dmca, information, policy violations, rules, streamers, takedowns
Companies: twitch

Streamer Raptors Continue To Test Twitch's Appropriate Content Guideline Fencing

from the wet-willy dept

It's no secret that we've dinged streaming giant Twitch over and over again these past months. Frankly, it was done with good reason, as the Amazon-owned company continues to respond to crisis after crises, conflict after conflict, with pure confusion and callous behavior. While some of those conflicts were Twitch-specific, the company is also dealing with the more common problem of attempting to have a coherent content policy when it comes to what is appropriate to stream and what is not. For instance, Twitch recently found itself in the headlines yet again first by yanking advertising revenue from so-called "hot tub meta" streamers, where streamers live-stream in bathing suits from hot tubs or kiddie pools. Kaitlyn "Amouranth" Siragusa was one of the more prominent names impacted by this move, which again came with no warning. As a result of the public backlash over Twitch choosing not to communicate with its own creative community, the platform announced a "hot tub channel" category, as though that solved anything.

But now this has moved on from just a situation where Twitch sucks at communication with streamers, its most important asset. With all of the above having occurred, it seems that the raptors are now going about testing their fencing when it comes to what content is appropriate and what is not. And, if you want to get a sense of just how weird these tests can get, you need only dive into the latest Twitch trend: ear lick meta streams. Perhaps not surprisingly, Amouranth is once again leading this charge.

Perpetual Twitch provocateur Amouranth, along with model indiefoxxlive, have been temporarily taken off the livestreaming service following some delightfully bizarre video clips going viral on social media. While Twitch never comments on bans, the timing coincides with the proliferation of a clip in which Amouranth wears a horse mask. Neighing, the controversial Twitch streamer sometimes takes the entire mic into her mouth to make slurping sounds.

Similarly, if you click on Twitch’s “ASMR” tag at the moment, the most popular streamer is a woman whispering with the occasional wet sound thrown in. The community has taken to calling such shticks “ear lick streams,” as that is basically what these broadcasts sound like.

"Delightfully bizarre" appears to be exactly the right phrase for all of this. ASMR is not specifically meant to have any sexual connotation to it. That being said, it seems quite clear that what Amouranth and the like are doing is in part at least attempting to rope some measure of sexuality into behavior that would otherwise not necessarily have any sexual connotation to it. And, of course, adding a dash of the absolutely absurd just for shits and giggles.

In other words, if you want to argue that there is clear sexual connotation to these specific videos (you can find them in the link above if you're curious), I won't argue with you all that much. But -- and this is a big caveat -- finding precisely where and how any of this violates Twitch's streaming guidelines on what's appropriate is very much an exercise in subjectivity.

The general idea predates Twitch, of course, but it’s certainly true that Amouranth is savvy enough to command attention wherever she goes. Whether or not viewers approve of her methods is beyond the point. Twitch’s Community Guidelines have multiple pages dedicated to sexually suggestive content on the site, but the general gist is that it’s not allowed on the platform.

“Evaluations on the sexual suggestiveness of a behavior or activity are independent of user attire and are instead based on the overall surrounding framing and context,” the rules read. “This policy also applies to embedded media, augmented reality, creative broadcasts, and channel content—such as banners, profile images, emotes, and panels—that are focused on provocative images or video.”

But this leaves us still with two issues. The first is yet again how Twitch doles out these punishments and changes without any real communication with streamers or the public. It all just kind of happens and we get to play the game of attempting to interpret what it all means after the fact. The second issue is common among online platforms that do a shit job of having clear content guidelines: nobody actually knows where the lines are and these punishments tend to be doled out asymmetrically.

For example, the above guidelines would appear to prohibit, oh I don't know, a liveplay of Dungeons and Dragons in which the players creatively act out to one degree or another sexual situations. And, yet, shows like Critical Role which stream on Twitch have had such content in one degree or another on the regular. Is that considered as graphic as a woman in a horse mask engulfing a microphone in her mouth?

Maybe? This feels like less of an obvious answer and more of a discussion open to interpretation. But, since Twitch has the final say for what occurs on its platform, only its opinion actually matters. But that doesn't change the fact that Twitch's guidelines are vague and unhelpful, its communication method neutered, and its handing out of punishment arbitrary and capricious.

Good times. Sluuuuuurp!

Filed Under: appropriate content, content moderation, streamers, streaming
Companies: twitch

Twitch Manages To Get Out Some 'Disappointment' With Music Industry Over Latest Round Of DMCA Claims

from the oooooh-disappointment! dept

The saga that has been Twitch's last six or so months is long and somewhat varied, so you should go read up on our historical coverage if you're not familiar with it, but we need to at least preface this post with the origins of how Twitch's bad time began. What has been a tumultuous several months began when it absolutely freaked out over a flood of DMCA takedown notices it received, mostly from the music industry. In response to that, and without warning to its creative community, Twitch nuked a bunch of content from the platform, mostly ignored the outcry from its creators, and did very little to put anything in place that would keep such a disastrous situation from happening again.

So of course it happened again. Twitch recently sent out an email that it had received roughly 1,000 additional DMCA takedown notices, almost all of them again over music playing in the background of recorded Twitch videos.

Said Twitch in its email on Friday: “We are committed to being more transparent with you about DMCA. We recently received a batch of DMCA take down notifications with about 1,000 individual claims from music publishers.

“All of the claims are for the VODs and the vast majority target streamers listening to background music while playing video games or IRL streaming. Based on the number of claims we believe these rights holders used automated tools to scan and identify copyrighted music in creators VODs and clips, which means that they will likely send further notices."

Of course they will. Twitch invited them to when it showed itself to be a willing partner in treating Twitch creators like a testing ground for DMCA cluster bombs. There are platforms out there that manage to both treat DMCA requests seriously and also provide some protection, or at least communication, to its users. A few tools for creators aside, Twitch's inaction on behalf of its creative community amounted essentially to greenlighting ever more DMCA takedowns from the music industry. Any surprise at that by the Amazon-owned company is laughable.

But this neutered, throwaway line from that same email is simply maddening.

“This is our first such contact from the music publishing industry (there can be several owners for a single piece of music) and we are disappointed that they decided to send takedowns when we were willing and ready to speak to them about solutions.”

As the old saying goes, be disappointed at the music industry's aggressive copyright enforcement in one hand and spit in the other and see which fills up faster. There is no substance to this disappointment. Of course the music industry has gone kazoo filing DMCA notices at Twitch. Twitch has made it clear its on their side, even making it easier than before to file these notices.

The real disappointment here is that Twitch, and by extension Amazon, has so wildly left its creative community out to dry when it comes to copyright enforcement and DMCA takedowns. It's simply not doing enough.

Filed Under: background, dmca, music industry, streaming
Companies: twitch

Getting Absurd: Twitch Creates A 'Hot Tub' Channel, Says It Should Have Communicated With Streamers About Demonitization

from the sigh dept

Twitch seems to be putting on some sort of master class in how to respond to a crisis on its platform in as confusing a manner as possible. Without writing a thousand word summary, this whole thing started when Twitch nuked a bunch of streamer content in response to a backlog of DMCA notices, changed its affiliate program without notice, hung its streamers out to dry over the DMCAs when the backlash occurred, and basically angered the hell out of its most important asset, it's creative community. This basically set the theme for the public that Twitch wasn't treating its community very well.

This continued to the present. Most recently, we discussed one streamer suddenly having her channel demonitized, ostensibly over so called "hot tub meta" streams, in which she appears in a bathing suit in a hot tub. While Twitch can do as it pleases with its platform, the real issue here was that all of this was done without any communication or notice from Twitch to the streamer, who goes by the handle Amouranth. Well, it turns out that she wasn't alone in having her channel suddenly demonitized in this fashion.

The company also addressed the recent controversy surrounding the sudden, uncommunicated demonetization of Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa’s channel, which took place earlier this week in reaction to complaints which Siragusa says came from from a single advertiser (Siragusa told Kotaku in an email that Twitch would not say which advertiser). Twitch’s post seems to dispute this characterization, instead attributing it to “the majority of our advertiser base.” Siragusa, however, was not alone. Sources have since told Kotaku that a number of streamers had advertising removed from their channels, though it seems that not all of them noticed or said anything publicly. This has alarmed Twitch streamers, who are now in the dark as to what’s considered advertiser-friendly content and what’s not—meaning they, too, are at risk of suddenly not being able to make money off Twitch ads anymore. In the blog post, Twitch did not do much to assuage their fears, but it did confirm that demonetization is a thing that can happen now.

“On Twitch, brands get to decide where and when their ads appear,” the company wrote. “Today, they can target or avoid specific categories of content and flag channels that don’t meet their standards. This means that Twitch, in rare cases, will suspend advertising on a channel at the advertisers’ request. We absolutely do not permit brands to use protected characteristics as a filter for advertising targeting or blocking.”

Note that this is all communication that occurred after the fact. Acknowledging that, Twitch specifically stated that the way it had treated Amouranth was a "mistake." As was the lack of communication with all of the other streamers who had their channels demonitized. As was not getting the communication about what control advertisers had over channels receiving ad revenue until after all this occurred. Mistake after mistake, all of which quite frankly appear to be conscious decisions rather than oopsies.

And, in an almost exact replication of the ready-fire-aim method Twitch employed for its DMCA debacle, the company's remedy for this now is to roll out more tools for advertisers and creators to avoid this situation that should have been avoided with those tools in the first place.

To remedy this and other issues, Twitch said it’s “working to develop more robust controls for advertisers and viewers to enable them to control their experiences on our service.” It’s also working on figuring out how to communicate to streamers what exactly “brand safe” means, but this functionality will apparently “take time to build and implement.”

The other plan Twitch has coming out of this latest situation is, and I cannot stress enough that this is real, the introduction of "hot tub" channels and the like.

In a new blog post today, Twitch announced that it has created a new category: “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches.” Previously, hot tub streamers largely used the catch-all Just Chatting category, which led some streamers and viewers to accuse them of somehow breaking the rules—despite the fact that they were not actually breaking Twitch’s rules. In the blog post, Twitch clarified this.

“While we have guidelines about sexually suggestive content, being found to be sexy by others is not against our rules, and Twitch will not take enforcement action against women, or anyone on our service, for their perceived attractiveness,” the company wrote, adding that it discourages harassment against all streamers regardless of their actions or intentions. “Under our current Nudity & Attire and Sexually Suggestive Content policies, streamers may appear in swimwear in contextually appropriate situations (at the beach, in a hot tub, for example), and we allow creative expression like body writing and body painting, provided the streamer has appropriate coverage as outlined by our attire policy.”

So, Amouranth did nothing wrong as far as Twitch is concerned, but it still demonitized her channel at the request of "advertisers" for reasons never fully articulated, not against Twitch's rules, without notice or communication, and with an almost perfect lack of transparency. But, hey, here's a new hot tub category for you all to stream in? The only real use I see for that is I can finally pitch Mike on my idea for a speedo-clad Twitch Techdirt stream where I yell about beer trademarks in a kiddie pool.

This is where I remind you that Twitch is an Amazon property and has hefty resources to pull from to do its platform and PR right. It just doesn't seem to want to and the one left holding the proverbial bag is its creative community.

Cool.

Filed Under: advertisers, content moderation, monetization, streaming
Companies: twitch

Twitch Yanks Advertising Revenue From Popular 'Hot Tub Streamer' With No Warning Or Dialogue

from the fast-twitch dept

We've covered a variety of issues Twitch is facing as a platform over the past several months, but there has also been a theme to all of these issues. Whether it's been Twitch's decision to simply nuke a bunch of creator content due to DMCA claims it received for them, its tone-deaf attempt to redirect the focus onto a dumb emoji, changes to its affiliate program, or how it chooses to roll out, or not, tools for creators to respond to the DMCApocalypse it kicked off, those stories all have one thing in common: they demonstrate that Twitch does a brutally terrible job of communicating to its most valuable asset, its own creative community.

When changes happen at Twitch, they often come as a shock to Twitch streamers. If you think that streaming on a platform that is constantly pulling the rug out from under you sounds like a terrible idea, well, I agree with you. And it just keeps happening. The latest is one streamer, who at least partially made a name for herself doing so-called "hot tub meta" streams, suddenly having her ability to make advertising revenue stripped from her without warning or dialogue.

Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa is one of the most popular female streamers on Twitch. As of now, she can no longer make money off ads on her channel. Siragusa, already one of the more recognizable names on Twitch, has benefited tremendously from the so-called “hot tub meta,” in which swimsuit-clad streamers talk to their chats, play games, and perform other activities from hot tubs. This has proven controversial despite Twitch noting to Kotaku and others that it’s not against the platform’s rules. Now Twitch has taken a different, arguably more damaging sort of action against the biggest streamer to participate in the meta.

“Yesterday I was informed that Twitch has indefinitely suspended advertising on my channel,” Siragusa wrote on Twitter today. “Twitch didn’t reach out in any way whatsoever. I had to initiate the conversation after noticing, without any prior warning, all the ads revenue had disappeared from my channel analytics.”

Let's get this out of the way: you may not like the idea of streams that are essentially women in bathing suits in inflatable pools chatting with viewers and doing random things... and that doesn't matter for this story in the slightest. Instead, what matters is that once again we have Twitch making important changes that effect streamers on its platform with both no warning at all and with no clear standard for the rules streamers are supposed to follow. In fact, as Kotaku notes, Twitch has previously indicated that these "hot tub meta" streams don't violate its rules. So, then, why strip the advertising revenue?

Frankly, nobody seems to know.

“Many people complain about [Twitch’s terms of service] being ‘unclear,’ but at least there’s something to go by,” she wrote. “There is no known policy for what results in a streamer being put on this blacklist. With characteristic opacity, the only thing Twitch made clear is that it is unclear whether or when my account can be reinstated.”

“The issue isn’t Twitch removing ads. It’s them doing so without any clarification of what their guidelines are,” she said. “We saw this coming. Everyone expected it. No one expected it without communication, though. Just, like, a stealth removal.”

She also attempted to manually run an ad from her Twitch dashboard as an experiment, but when she clicked the button, nothing happened.

She's exactly right, frankly. Say what you want about the sort of streaming she does on Twitch, but ripping away very real money and sources of income without warning is not a creator-friendly action for a platform to take. And, as I noted, this fits with the ongoing theme of Twitch not giving a hot damn about its creative community. Were it otherwise, the platform might actually attempt to communicate to and with creators, working with them to avoid this kind of policy-by-surprise system it appears to have set up for itself.

Twitch has built up quite a community for itself over the years, but lately its actions have called into questions whether it even deserves that community.

Filed Under: content moderation, kaitlyn siragusa, monetization, rule changes, streaming
Companies: twitch

Angry Joe Tears Into Twitch Over Its One-Sided Approach To DMCA Takedowns

from the strike-a-match dept

Famed YouTuber and Twitch streamer Angry Joe, or Jose Antonio Vargas, has made it onto Techdirt's pages in the past. True to his name, we've discussed his responses on a couple of intellectual property issues he's suffered through. When Nintendo flagged a video Angry Joe did about Mario Party 10, preventing him from further monetizing the video, he simply and angrily swore off of doing any Nintendo videos in the future, rightly noting that with the decision all the free advertising he'd given Nintendo just disappeared. When CBS blocked a review video he did because the review used 13 seconds of Star Trek: Picard, he took to Twitter to rip them to shreds as well. The point is that when Angry Joe encounters the frustrations many others deal with thanks to overly restrictive intellectual property practices, he doesn't stay silent. He gets... well... angry.

With that in mind, it's probably not all that surprising that the way Twitch is handling its DMCA process has finally caught up to Angry Joe resulting in yet another angry rant. Like many other Twitch creators, Angry Joe has been hit with DMCA notices. As he goes on to note, the process Twitch has designed for how this all works, well, sucks out loud.

Joe highlighted two major issues with Twitch’s system. The first is the strikes on people’s accounts are permanent, and don’t expire after 90 days like YouTube.

“Copyright strikes do not depreciate after a set period of time. If I receive three strikes my channel is terminated, yet I can’t see the strike, I can’t submit a counter-notification, I can’t submit a dispute,” he said in a recent rant. “It can’t get any worse than this.”

This seems both like it should be an easy problem to fix and an easy problem to have completely avoided in the first place. If anyone had bothered to test out Twitch's DMCA process prior to putting it in place, especially from the perspective of someone who had received multiple DMCA notices, it would have been immediately obvious that multiple strikes create a situation where the accused can't even counter the notice.

But the issues with the dispute program go deeper than that.

Joe used an example of a copyright strike he received in February 2021 for a Warzone clip dating back to November 2020, which had the Astronomia song ⁠— popularized by the coffin dance meme ⁠— playing inside the game.

“Here is your DMCA strike. What is the clip? We don’t have a link to the clip. We told you to delete all of your VODs. There is no ‘Dispute’ button,” he explained. “You can’t even review the VODs identified in DMCA notifications in your dashboard, and they don’t plan [on adding that feature] that until December 2021.”

If this all sounds absurd, it very much is. We've made this point before, but Twitch creators are Twitch's biggest and most important asset. Twitch is owned by Amazon. Amazon has virtually unlimited resources. Instead of bringing those resources to bear on all this nonsense, Twitch has instead hung its most important assets out to dry. The roadmap items are half a year away. Creators are getting slammed with these DMCA requests. Twitch is mostly doing nothing other than admiring the failed program it has rolled out.

It should be noted that Angry Joe has a very loud voice when it comes to streamers. If this doesn't get fixed soon, this could lead to a creator exodus.

Filed Under: angry joe, dmca, jose antonio vargas, streaming
Companies: twitch

Twitch Takes Steps To Make It Even Easier To Issue DMCA Strikes Against Streamers

from the here-we-go-again dept

If you've been following along with us, the past several months haven't gone great for streaming platform Twitch. It all started with Twitch's decision to simply nuke a bunch of streamer content as a result of a massive influx of DMCA notices it received. While Twitch streamers and some in the public went ballistic over this, the company decided to try to distract the world with bright shiny objects like emojis, only to continue to let the DMCApocalypse continue even after it apologized for its lack of transparency. Then Amazon, which owns Twitch, put on Twitch's GlitchCon and spent a pretty penny on it, while streamers on the platform wondered why Amazon didn't just spend that money on the licensing needed to keep streamers out of copyright jail. Fresh into 2021, Twitch then gave creators tools to help avoid copyright strikes, which mostly consisted of convenient ways to delete a bunch of their own content while not bothering to put in a method for policing DMCA abuse.

And now it seems like a near certainty that this is all going to get way, way worse. Twitch, without notice, recently released a new tool on its site to make it even easier to issue DMCA notices on creators.

Now, it is worth noting that this approach is somewhat different. Because this page requires a Twitch login in order to submit a claim, this appears to be less about giving industry rightsholders a way to DMCA the hell out of Twitch and more about giving fellow Twitch creators a way to DMCA the hell out of each other. Now, nothing prevents anyone who wants to use this tool from just creating a Twitch account to do so, so there is certainly the potential for abusing this new tool.

And it seems Twitch knows that, as this tool forces anyone looking to issue a DMCA notice to affirm that they're doing so rightfully.

Users must also fill out their contact information and agree that the claim is filed in good faith. However, seemingly to prevent abuse of this feature, Twitch also states that users must state they are “authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed” under penalty of perjury.

Viewers seem a bit mixed on the new feature, with some suspecting it will result in more bans and reports than we’d see otherwise.

Of course it will. This is going to make things measurably worse on the DMCA front, with the only real question being just how bad this is going to get. And, mind you, this is all done instead of Amazon investing in the licensing Twitch creators would need in order to be relatively safe from being DMCA'd to hell.

Now, we can argue all day long whether our dumb copyright culture has ballooned into a scenario where all these licenses and all of this enforcement of copyright is really silly and counterproductive for all involved. I'm way into that discussion. But given the current reality, Amazon is simply not doing right by Twitch's most valuable asset: it's creative community.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, streaming, takedowns
Companies: twitch

New Year, Same You: Twitch Releases Tools To Help Creators Avoid Copyright Strikes, Can't Properly Police Abuse

from the getting-twitchy dept

Readers here will remember that the last quarter of 2020 was a very, very bad time for streaming platform Twitch. It all started when the RIAA came calling on the Amazon-owned platform, issuing a slew of DMCA takedown notices over all sorts of music included in the recorded streams of creators. Instead of simply taking the content down and issuing a notice to creators, Twitch simply perma-deleted the content in question, with no recourse for a counternotice given to creators as an option. After an explosive backlash, Twitch apologized, but still didn't offer any clarity or tools for creators to understand what might be infringing content and what was being targeted. Instead, during its remote convention, Twitch only promised more information and tools in the coming months.

Five months later, Twitch has finally informed its creators of the progress its made on that front: tools on the site to help creators remove material flagged as infringement and some more clarity on what is infringing.

Twitch announced in an email to streamers that the site has added new tools today to help creators see where they stand with takedown requests and copyright strikes. Twitch also added tools to let streamers mass delete their recorded streams. It’s a smart move because it gives streamers better tools to play on the right side of copyright law. (If you don’t, and you rack up enough copyright strikes, you get permabanned.)

Now, in the event that a streamer gets hit with a DMCA takedown request, it’ll show up in their on-site inbox; Twitch’s video producer will also show the number of copyright strikes a channel has received. In addition, streamers can now unpublish or delete all their VODs at once (or in batches of 20 at a time).

It's not that Twitch's new tool is a bad thing. More clarity for creators and an increased ability to granularly address DMCA notices for their content is a decidedly good thing. But it all feels both extremely late in coming because, obviously, Twitch should have known that DMCA notices on creators from the copyright industries would be a thing.

But if you're looking for encouraging signs that Twitch is getting its shit together in policing its own site, you certainly won't find it in the story of how one creator got one of his accounts banned for an account name that was "harassment via username." The user he's accused of harassing would appear to be... himself.

It might be an understatement to say that popular Minecraft YouTuber and streamer George “GeorgeNotFound’’ Davidson had a weird weekend. Within two days, he got banned from Twitch, possibly un-banned, definitely banned again, and unbanned (again?). Why? “Harassment via username,” according to Twitch. Problem is, the only person he could have possibly been harassing was himself.

The new, different ban email from Twitch accused him of “harassment via username” and once again informed him that the suspension was indefinite—aka, a ban. This one also further elaborated on what exactly he might have done, without telling him exactly what he definitely did. Examples included “having a username that explicitly insults another user,” “having a username that threatens negative action towards another user,” and “having a username that promotes self-harm in conjunction with malicious chat activity, such as telling another user to kill themselves.”

Obviously, "ThisIsNotGeorgeNotFound" does not do any of those things. And, yet, his account was banned for a second time. He has since had the account unbanned. Which, fine, but what the hell is going on at Twitch that it never seems to get any of this right? And if the platform can't be trusted to do something as relatively simple as properly policing creators' handles, why would anyone have any confidence that it's going to navigate waters as treacherous as the Copyright Seas any better?

Look, Twitch grew up fast. And nobody expects any growing platform to be perfect from the get go. But with the backing of a parent company like Amazon, it certainly should be able to do better by its creators than this.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, streaming
Companies: amazon, twitch