Twitch Already Walking Back Some Parts of Policies Announced Yesterday, Users Still Concerned
I'm just going to watch Fish Plays Pokémon until this blows over.
Yesterday, Twitch rustled a lot of jimmies with new policies that removed the ability to save streams forever and began scanning saved videos for copyright infringement. Users let Twitch know how they felt about the new changes in a Reddit AMA, and Twitch is already acting on that feedback to improve the situation.
Twitch initially announced that full streams would no longer be saved indefinitely, but that users could create two-hour highlight reels and save those forever. After their customers’ reactions, they announced in a blog post that they’ve decided to modify the rules for the highlight reels so that they can be any length, so users can still save more than two hours’ worth of content if they need to.
Presumably, that will still curb users randomly saving several hours of streaming content on a whim with the added step of making it into a highlight reel, so it sounds like a decent compromise. What is really disconcerting to most users, though, is the scanning of saved videos for copyrighted music content.
With the rumored YouTube acquisition of Twitch still looming, it’s reminding a lot of users of YouTube’s reviled copyright bots, so the basic reaction pretty much goes like this:
The solution proposed by Twitch is an appeal button for streamers to use when they’ve been unfairly accused of infringement. Commenters are still unhappy, because the bot will entirely mute whatever 30-minute section of video where it finds copyrighted content, and they worry an appeal button won’t necessarily resolve all cases quickly or favorably.
The blog post also promises to continue working to address users’ concerns in the future, but unfortunately for Twitch, the damage may already have been done. The Internet is fickle—especially when it comes to copyright bots—and many of the commenters on the blog post indicate that they’ve already lost trust in Twitch, and they’re unimpressed with the solutions. Some are already advocating jumping ship for new competitor hitbox.tv.
If you’ve got concerns or questions of your own, Twitch encourages you to voice them in today’s Twitch Weekly from 5-5:30PM EDT, where CEO Emmett Shear will answer your questions via Twitch chat or on Twitter.
(via Twitch)
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