Twitch has a massive issue with copyright takedowns and it seems like the company’s own channel fears this. During a live performance from legendary band Metallica at Blizzcon, Twitch cut the audio and replaced it with a piece of generic royalty free elevator music. It’s beyond parody.
Last year Twitch received a lot of heat after a number of rather insane DMCA takedowns. The company usually allows its streamers to play music in the background of their streams as well as host watch parties of movies available on Amazon Prime Video. This tranquil online existence blew up when major streamers noticed their content getting removed, sometimes for really nonsensical reasons. Popular streamer xQc got a DMCA takedown from just showing a clip of his own stream. Needless to say, the system is broken and yet another development continues to prove that.
Twitch was live streaming Blizzcon on its own official channel and all was well and good until Metallica showed up. The band performed one of its most iconic songs, For Whom The Bell Tolls, which prompted Twitch to mute the audio and replace it with some 8bit music. Not only is Twitch afraid of getting a DMCA takedown on its own platform, it’s afraid of getting taken down by a band using its own music. The chaos was captured and shared around the internet, courtesy of Rod Breslau and YouTube user wearethemonks.
The irony of the whole situation is that Metallica had a notable influence on DMCA as it is seen today when the band sued file sharing service Napster in the early 2000s. The actual “uncensored” version of the performance was aired without issue on YouTube, demonstrating that these rampant DMCA issues are not universal, and giving Metallica fans a good avenue to admire a solid performance from their favorite band.
Whether Metallica would’ve gone after Twitch for rebroadcasting the event isn’t known, but it seems incredibly unlikely. It also proves how undeniably flawed the system is, if not even Twitch itself is safe. Twitch has previously promised to try and fix the situation in a way that will help everyone, but it doesn’t seem like this solution has actually been implemented yet. At the time of this writing, Twitch has not yet made any sort of statement regarding the Metallica performance.
