Twitch is arguably one of, if not the most, popular live-streaming platforms on the net; but considering the current DMCA debacle, streamers are getting banned left and right for even a few seconds of copyrighted material being played during their broadcasts.
This development has led many IRL streamers to consider switching from that category to something safer, rather than traveling to locations where music might be playing over loudspeakers — but sometimes, even this isn’t enough.
In fact, some broadcasters have gotten in trouble with Twitch over copyrighted emotes in their chat. This unfortunately may have happened to popular streamer KaitlinWitcher, who found her channel suddenly banned on March 18.
In a series of now-privated tweets, the broadcaster expressed complete confusion as to why her channel was suddenly taken down, unsure as to why she’d been banned.
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Shortly thereafter, KaitlinWitcher revealed she’d been sent an email stating that her emote, ‘Koot Blood,’ was copyrighted — although she couldn’t understand how that was the case, as the emote is simply the word “Blood Lust” in big red lettering.
“I got an email saying koot blood was copyrighted?” she wrote. “It was just blood lust typed out, wasn’t it?”
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However, that may not have been the exact reason for her Twitch suspension; the streamer also hypothesized that she may have gotten DMCA’d due to playing a song from popular cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender during a stream.
More specifically, the song isn’t necessarily an official “track”; it’s taken from a part of the show where the “Gaang” are sung a local folktale during their travels, which has become somewhat of a meme in the show’s community.
“…would 10 seconds of the secret tunnel song from Avatar: The Last Airbender get me a DMCA strike on Twitch?” the streamer asked. “Does anyone know? LOL.”
For now, it seems that one of these two reasons could be related to KaitlinWitcher’s sudden ban — but either way, both are definitely odd reasons to be suspended from the platform.
Luckily, Twitch has unrolled a new tool to better help streamers avoid potential DMCA takedowns, which should help KaitlinWitcher combat the issue fairly soon.
