Twitch and the music industry strike a deal, but it’s not great

Last year music industry crackdown on streaming site Twitch resulted in copyright strikes and mass deletion of videos, as the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) sought to reduce the number of streamers broadcasting licensed music. Twitch has now made a deal with NMPA, but for streamers, that’s not much of a game-changer.

As The Washington Post reports, earlier today, an email was sent to streamers explaining the terms of the deal and what it would mean to them and their use of music in the future. This is not really an improvement (emphasis mine):

We’re excited to announce that we’ve reached an agreement with the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) to build productive partnerships between Twitch and music publishers. As part of this agreement, we want to inform you of a new process that we are creating for participating music rights holders who may choose to report certain uses of their music, which is more flexible and forgiving for creators who use music inadvertently or accidentally. in their flows than the existing process required under the DMCA and similar global laws.

At a high level, this new process, separate from the DMCA, focuses on pursuing egregious uses of music and begins with a warning instead of penalties. Now, when a participating rights holder reports unauthorized music usage on a creator’s channel, the following happens

• Similar to DMCA, we have a team that will review reports and verify completeness

• Unlike DMCA, Twitch will give creators a chance to correct their course by issuing a warning first.:

• Twitch will remove all VODs and clips containing unauthorized music from the creator’s channel.
• If a live broadcast involves one of the many egregious musical uses specified (for example, replaying music concerts and streaming pre-release tracks), Twitch may also issue a warning or penalty depending on the history of the creator of this type of music use. We will have more information to share here in the coming weeks..

This new process does not change the way music can be used on Twitch. creators of music and goes against Twitch’s mission to support all creators. But we recognize that not all unauthorized uses of music deserve the same treatment, and we hope that, as part of our agreements with music rights holders, we can take a balanced approach that supports creators on Twitch.

This new chord looks a lot like the old one, but now, in most cases (with the exception of “specific uses of blatant music”), streamers will receive a warning before their stuff is cleared and a notice is issued. So the actual permissions and systems behind Twitch’s response will be largely the same, as their only tools in this fight are the removal of content and punishment of users, and the rules governing the use of the. Music by a streamer hasn’t changed either, as the industry still won’t allow the streaming of unlicensed content.

It’s hard to see this as some sort of victory for the streamers, as the only change on their side is a warning before the same drastic steps are taken, but the music industry is obviously quite happy. Which, okay, it never really was about streamers in the first place anyway. Twitch’s crackdown on licensed music was done to protect Amazon’s service as a platform, and so this deal was never going to make it easier for users to play licensed music, as it was. primarily designed to cover Twitch’s own ass.