Gamers have been up in arms ever since Twitch began to enforce harsher restrictions against users playing copyrighted music in their videos. Hovering around the edges of this chorus of unpleasantly surprised voices, meanwhile, are all the YouTube broadcasters who are still reeling from the crackdown they all experienced back in December 2013.
Popular video game personality and video commentator TotalBiscuit weighed in on the Twitch news today, drawing from his own experience with his YouTube channel The Cynical Brit. Itâs well worth your time, seeing how he offers a refreshingly measured and diplomatic take on an emotionally fraught issue.
The main takeaway here is: however gamers and Twitch users feel about the crackdown, itâs something they should have seen coming for a while now. As Twitchâs popularity as a service has increased, so too has its profile as a company. Itâs now subject to regular reports and rumors about potential buyouts by massive tech companies like Google, after all.
TotalBiscuit therefore argued that Twitchâs increased visibility means the company is feeling pressured to extend an âolive branchâ to anybody that might want to sue them, lest the company end up in a situation like Google did with Viacom. Previously, Twitch streamers were riding high on a freedom that YouTubers are no longer afforded when it comes to using licensed material in their videos.
âDonât want to say I told you so, but a lot of us has been saying this was gonna happen for a very long time,â TotalBiscuit said. âTwitch has simply been getting too big to get away with this.â
Previously, he argued, the Twitch community had adopted a âlaissez faireâ attitude that some users took too far: by using licensed music in their videos, even playing songs straight from Spotify or Grooveshark and thus messing with whatever royalty system those services use to actually reward artists.
âReally, its very difficult to argue in favor of that,â TotalBiscuit argued. âYouâre broadcasting stuff that doesnât belong to you and youâre making money in the process. Even if youâre not making money in the process, youâre still not really allowed to do that.â
Now: thatâs not to say that Twitch users are completely to blame hereâjust that some people havenât been as cautious as they should have been. And since Twitchâs new rules only currently apply to video-on-demand content rather than the far more popular live-streamed material, heâs not sure if Twitch users will end up in that much worse of a situation once the dust settles. But the larger problem he gets at in the video is that Twitch is at risk of recreating all the same arbitrary, even draconian regulations that YouTubers like him must work under now that the company is using an automated system to sift through troves and content and flag offending material.
âHereâs the thing about these automated systems: they donât bloody work properly,â TotalBiscuit argued. âThey have far too many false positives.â As many critics noted once the news broke last night, Twitchâs means of marking and muting videos has already yielded some truly bizarre resultsâinexplicably muting in-game music, and even some of the companyâs channels that it runs on its own service.
âYou cannot kill piracy in this kind of whack-a-mole, aggressive style,â he concluded. âIt simply does not work. It will keep popping up in other places.â
Watch the whole video above.
To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq
