DragonForce Guitarist Herman Li Suspended on Twitch For Playing His Own Music

[jiyeon]

Following Twitch's recent rampage of suspensions surrounding the streaming of copyrighted music under the premises of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DragonForce guitarist and avid streamer Herman Li has been suspended on Twitch for playing his own music while streaming, seemingly misapplied.

 

 

 

Herman is/was a prominent supporter of music on the streaming platform, often allowing his viewers and fans alike to cover DragonForce's songs without the knife of Twtich's DMCA takedown riding down the backs of smaller, aspiring streamers.

 

Twitch hasn't appeared to have given a statement on why Herman was suspended, but fans speculate it was evidently because of music, given that Herman 99% of the time on his now-suspended channel was playing his guitar for thousands of his fans to see.

 

It's yet another nail in the well-secured coffin for Twitch's dwindling and now-intimidated small and big streamerbase, when even a music streamer with such high pedigree in DragonForce's Herman Li gets suspended, although the reason has not explicitly been noted.

 

While not a music producer myself, I feel like as a member of DragonForce and therefor under the label of DragonForce, he would be able to amend the situation by simply asking his label to give permission to his own music? However, I feel like Herman Li is one to take it on the chin and move on to YouTube, as conveyed in the tweet above, at least until/if his Twitch channel is unsuspended.

[Fasauceome]

It's a lot more common on YouTube, but I've seen this a few times before. Someone gets a takedown due to the automatic system flagging their own content and not realizing that it's their own. In a sense, the algorithm knows "who owns the music" and doesn't know who the user that posted it is. 

 

Results may vary, from the platform instantly recognizing that something is wrong and fixing it to the ban never being appealed at all. I'd imagine for a prominent streamer the former is more likely, with an apology from twitch.

[IntMD]

 

 

Looks like it got sorted...

 

[Beskamir]

I wonder how long until society realizes that everything is a remix and finally fixes copyright law.

[Spotty]

1 minute ago, Beskamir said:

I wonder how long until society realizes that everything is a remix and finally fixes copyright law.

When there's no longer money to be made by owning the rights to something.

[WereCatf]

7 minutes ago, Spotty said:

When there's no longer money to be made by owning the rights to something.

Translation: never.

[Doobeedoo]

Scuffed stuff, I remember Matt Heafy from Trivium who also streams that in a way he doesn't own his music. He talked about labels and all that, etc. 

Definitely things need to change, completely different age now than way back. 

[Teddy07]

Is the image also constantly moving up and down for anyone?
It seems the update is buggy because the whole pages moves with it

[Beskamir]

3 hours ago, Spotty said:

When there's no longer money to be made by owning the rights to something.

 

3 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Translation: never.

 

Ugh, it's at moments like this that I wish communism won even when it completely sucked.

[wall03]

1 hour ago, Teddy07 said:

Is the image also constantly moving up and down for anyone?
It seems the update is buggy because the whole pages moves with it

i would put that in forum bugs and issues

[Kisai]

15 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Translation: never.

There are ways to solve this, but neither the recording industries/publishers nor the platforms want to invest in it.

 

Step 1. Have streaming software explicitly put music on a separate channel

Step 2. Utilize the AI/Algorithms to identify the music on that channel

Step 3. Ask the streamer to license or mute the song for everyone, if the streamer doesn't want to license it, then only people who own it already can hear it

Step 3B, Anyone who owns the song on amazon, itunes, or has a subscription to apple music, spotify, pandora, etc will check if they already have a legal means to play it and it will played locally in sync with the streamer.

 

Amazon already has the ability to do a watch party, so extending this directly to music is clearly possible.

 

Twitch Soundtrack so far has been an uber failure as people who started using wound up with no audio at all in their streams, and integration with streaming software has been rather failure prone. The goal of Twitch SoundTrack is counter-intuitive though, it lets you play some of the few dozen songs licenced for it on the stream, but they're silent in the VOD. And of course, makes it unusable for youtube.

 

Then there are games like Stepmania(X), Osu, Beat Saber, and Muse Dash which have their own licensed songs which will be picked up. Likewise the GTA games and Saints Row games have licensed music that would also trip this due to the radio or storyline-beats.

 

Playing console versions of Dance Dance Revolution or Just Dance is basically impossible because the songs aren't particularly transformed in the game (DDR mixes tend to be 90 seconds.) However there are versions like DDR Mario and DDR Disney which actually involve two license holders.

 

Something really needs to change with how music is treated, because the way the music industry behaves is still assumes everyone is a pirate and should pay every time they listen to it, regardless if they own a physical or digital copy of it.

[Mark Kaine]

Watch him get banned on yt too. For the same reason lol. 

[StDragon]

Playing on Twitch was his first mistake.

[Bombastinator]

5 hours ago, StDragon said:

Playing on Twitch was his first mistake.

Nah.  Naming a band “dragonforce” was his first mistake. 

[IkeaGnome]

15 hours ago, StDragon said:

Playing on Twitch was his first mistake.

Not necessarily. Since the Pandemic, there's been a lot of artists that have started playing on Twitch for cancelled tours. In his case he was on Twitch long before then and doing collabs with other Twitch artists and YT artists. 

[TheDankKoosh]

This is why I don't have an ounce of respect for current copyright law, 50 years ago it was used to protect smaller creators from large companies, but it just seems that has even been flipped on its back by the mega corporations that we see today.

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, TheDankKoosh said:

This is why I don't have an ounce of respect for current copyright law, 50 years ago it was used to protect smaller creators from large companies, but it just seems that has even been flipped on its back by the mega corporations that we see today.

Specifically Disney. 

[TheDankKoosh]

53 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Specifically Disney. 

Disney is definitely a big part of the problem, especially so since they are one of such companies that lobbies for the public domain to be pushed back just so they can keep that chokehold on mickey mouse, ironic since they made their fortune by animating movies based on books written well before their time. Last time I checked, public domain has only moved forward like 4 years in the past 40, or some ridiculous shit like that.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, TheDankKoosh said:

Disney is definitely a big part of the problem, especially so since they are one of such companies that lobbies for the public domain to be pushed back just so they can keep that chokehold on mickey mouse, ironic since they made their fortune by animating movies based on books written well before their time. Last time I checked, public domain has only moved forward like 4 years in the past 40, or some ridiculous shit like that.

And then there is the whole public domain exclusion status but yet somehow Warner/Chappell Music have the rights to Happy Birthday 

[LAwLz]

Breaking news! 

A system designed to be used by ~4 million users doesn't act exactly as expected when one person who breaks the norm uses it. The issue is fixed after manual precedures. 

 

 

If someone is playing copyrighted music on the platform it is safe to assume that they are breaking the law and aren't one of the ~10 people in the world who can authorize doing it legally. I don't think this is surprising or even need fixing (on twitch's part). 

[Trik'Stari]

That's a dumb decision on Twitch's part.

 

I do wish people would realize there is loads of amazing royalty and loicense free music available online, some of it quite good.

Spoiler

 

It'd be funny to see streamers en masse switch to music like this, to the point that music labels beg them to stop because they're suddenly selling less because their music is less relevant.

[Lurick]

On 10/31/2020 at 8:07 AM, Doobeedoo said:

Scuffed stuff, I remember Matt Heafy from Trivium who also streams that in a way he doesn't own his music. He talked about labels and all that, etc. 

Definitely things need to change, completely different age now than way back. 

Hello fellow Mert Heavy listener

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

That's a dumb decision on Twitch's part.

 

I do wish people would realize there is loads of amazing royalty and loicense free music available online, some of it quite good.

  Hide contents

 

It'd be funny to see streamers en masse switch to music like this, to the point that music labels beg them to stop because they're suddenly selling less because their music is less relevant.

That's now how music on streams work.

 

Here's an appropriate analogy circa 1990. You invite a friend over to listen to a CD (or LP, 8-track, cassette, whatever.) It does not cost your friend(s) in the room additional money to listen to YOUR CD. You wanted to introduce them to this music.

 

Twitch and Youtube, at least as far as "streaming" (not VOD) goes, this is the same idea. Except your audience might be between 1 and 10 million people. The recording industry however treats both audiences the same, in that "omg you're paying unlicenced music" when in fact radio stations (who also do this) do pay licensing, and often have music libraries built exactly the same way. A friend who had a connection to a radio station, came home one day with a few hundred CD's and ripped them all to mp3's at the time. Y'know so that they didn't have to rely on CD players or have to locate the physical disc.

 

https://www.soundexchange.com/service-provider/rates/commercial-webcaster/

 

Quote

1. Annual minimum fee: $500 per station or channel. Services with greater than 100 stations or channels pay $50,000.
2. 2020 Monthly liability: $0.0018 per performance (nonsubscription transmissions).
3. $0.0024 per performance (subscription transmissions)

 

That's what Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music pay. So people who want to be DJ's on twitch should be subjected to that as well. The reporting mechanics are kind of nasty though: https://www.soundexchange.com/service-provider/reporting-requirements/ , and it's something that requires the podcaster/dj to keep performance lists from their streams. VOD's however (where the audio remains baked into the video) is a separate license entirely from an entirely separate entity https://licensing.ascap.com/?type=digital .

 

https://www.ascap.com/help/career-development/a-checklist-for-using-music-in-film

Quote

If you are only placing your video on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or another social media site, you will generally not be required to obtain a performance license for your use of ASCAP music, as such platforms obtain their own performance license. 

 

At any rate, there's a lot of stupid going around in regards to how to license things, and the companies that own the rights to commercial music are still dragging their knuckles on how to get individuals to license their music, and instead try to extort the platform instead.  Twitch has 3 million channels, and is rather aggressive when it comes to muting music in VOD's.

[Bitter]

Scared Toyota might strike the engine noises from my Celica on YouTube now lol.

[Orange1]

On 10/30/2020 at 8:22 AM, sowon said:

Herman Li has been suspended on Twitch for playing his own music

Thats gotta suck, the automation needs to be more sophisticated for the ban hammer.

 

 

On 10/31/2020 at 2:42 AM, Beskamir said:

I wonder how long until society realizes that everything is a remix and finally fixes copyright law.

Society has no say in the manner, its lawyers and lobby groups only that have a say in it.