Posts Tagged: "Twitch"

On August 10, the Executive Board of the nonprofit organization Artist Rights Alliance (ARA) published a letter to Jeff Bezos, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Amazon.com, Inc. In the letter, the ARA asked Bezos to answer the question of whether the Twitch platform allows users to post or stream unlicensed music and to take necessary actions to stop such activity. The ARA advocates for a healthy music economy and for the rights of musicians, performers, and songwriters in the digital world. The letter expressed the ARA’s respect for Amazon and its products and services, but noted its disapproval of Amazon’s Twitch subsidiary, which allegedly hosts and delivers unlicensed music. Twitch is an online service owned by Amazon since 2014 that is used to watch and stream digital video broadcasts, such as streams dedicated to artwork creation, music, talk shows, and TV series.

The opinion acknowledges, in a footnote on page 3, that videos of the type that the Klein’s created, is not unique. Instead, it is part of a growing genre of “reaction videos” in which portions of an original video are interspersed with commentary to create a new creative work… Luckily for the Kleins, their fans were ready and willing to create a legal fund for their use. YouTube has also taken action to protect some content creators subject to false DMCA notices. However, with over 800 unique users, and over 100 hours of new videos being uploaded every minute, clearly YouTube cannot be required to protect all of its content creators from false copyright infringement allegations. In light of this decision, perhaps we are approaching a time where reconsideration, and revision, of the DMCA, is warranted.