License to Stream

Ethan Geist, Hannah Goertzen, and Kiaan Bondy sit down for a conversation on copyright and video game streaming, while setting up their own stream. In our “Twitch Stream”, we go through three main topics:

The Current State of Streaming

Twitch started in 2011 and in its first full year, 200 million hours of content was watched. This skyrocketed in 2020. In 2019, users viewed 11 billion hours of content. In 2020. that nearly doubled – to 18 billion hours. Last year, 20.8 billion hours were viewed (source). With such a big rise in a new form of media, legal challenges are inevitable
Twitch encourages all its streamers to abide by their regions copyright laws, telling them to get permission from developers and other copyright holders before playing content. If they fail to, and the copyright holder complains, they’ll be hit with a “DMCA Notification” and be sent to “Copyright School”.
Who is asking for the removal of content? Not developers! In fact, many developers (including Nintendo) either explicitly allow streaming and encourage it through early-releases to famous streamers. This is likely because it serves as good marketing for them.

Video games are bundles of copyrighted content – from the characters, to music, to voices. Developers could go after streamers for ‘public performance’ of their copyrighted work (Copyright Act, 1985 c C-42). Storied content is seen by the industry as less allowable to stream.
Streamers may be able to claim that they have changed the content enough to be considered ‘fair dealings’ if they can show that their work was used for ‘education’ or ‘review’.
Streamers’ biggest risk to have their content be taken down is the background music they play, or if they stream watch-alongs of tv shows or movies because those industries are more litigious.

Banned players and free speech

There’s a big debate about whether social media, including Twitch should be highly regulated or allow freedom of speech protection.
In Canada, for expression to be protected, it has to be in the ‘public space’ (Charter s. 2b). Some groups have argued that social media sites are a modern ‘town square’ and should be considered an online equivalent to government property (BC Civil Liberties Association). On the other side of the coin, Twitter has been considered a ‘public forum’ in order to prosecute someone for hate speech online (R v. Elliott).
Twitch regulates itself, banning users for language use or inciting negative actions, including banning a user for saying people should ‘kill’ a senator, and banning a user for inciting an insurrection. Twitch uses live moderation and an AutoModerator to track individual imagery and speech.

We hope you enjoyed the conversation around streaming! Thanks for tuning in — like and subscribe to our channel 🙂

We’ll share the slides after class as we don’t want any spoilers!