Twitch streamers are getting blindsided by years-old copyright notices

Over the last few days, a furor has been brewing on Twitch: out of the blue, streamers started seeing copyright takedown notices appear in their inboxes. The claimant was listed as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the infringing material was mostly recorded clips of old live broadcasts. And that’s a problem because it’s stated very clearly in the Twitch terms of service that if your account is dinged with three of these strikes, you get permabanned from Twitch.

The clips themselves were sometimes years old, too, which is a bigger headache because streamers who have been on the platform long enough have accumulated tons of these and now have a backlog rights holders can mine to file takedowns. Twitch doesn’t have...

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