Does Blizard Livestream Blizzcon on Twitch

This is light on details. Blizzard had their own channel up and was playing the music. This clip is from Twitch's channel. Lots of streamers were restreaming the event and right before this performance, there was a message that said, "The upcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder." I imagine only Blizzard themselves had the rights to stream it. You can watch it on Blizzard's channel https://www.twitch.tv/videos/920697882?t=1h24m52s

> and right before this performance, there was a message that said I understand the legality of it, but this is absurd! Anyone, anywhere, could watch the original livestream and hear the music. Or, you could watch it on Twitch, and get commentary on the whole thing by your chosen favourite twitcher, in addition to watching it yourself. But then, for legal reasons, the music was replaced. You could imagine a technical solution where Twitch just streams the twitcher against a transparent background, and you have to stitch it together yourself with the official stream, resulting in exactly the same experience as if Twitch did that stream stitching directly. That would be ok for legal reasons, even though it's completely identical to the not ok for legal reasons version above. How does that make sense? Why does it matter, to Metallica, where the streams are stitched together? Why does it matter, to them, that everyone watches the completely free stream of their music from a specific source, and not any other source? The value to Metallica is that they're getting paid by Blizzard. The value to Blizzard is that it drives attention to Blizzcon. Why does either of those entities care how exactly people are viewing Blizzcon? What matters is that people are watching it, and the how is secondary. But because of copyright laws, the how matters, and we get this absurd state.

Is the internet's memory really this short on this band's historical stance on copyright, RIAA, Napster, and so forth? They've always been like public enemy number 1 of music pirates...

I remember, but it's one thing to try to protect copyrighted material that you're selling, i.e. pirating vs selling CDs. But this thing where they're trying to protect exactly how you're receiving a free stream of their music makes no sense at all. The concert was already free to watch, so why does anyone care?

I'm not sure why people care. I'm not sure why people record, document, bootleg live performances. I have no idea how music works for profit anymore. I'm just sort of calling attention to the historical hatred of this one particular band, even if no one understands it anymore; but it is a thing that exists. I've witnessed it. I think it might be at the heart of the significance of this conversation. (and I'm only talking about _audio_ recording, I'm not even touching the copyright issues from audio + video)

> Why does it matter, to Metallica, where the streams are stitched together? Why does it matter, to them, that everyone watches the completely free stream of their music from a specific source, and not any other source? A likely explanation is that they charge Blizzard based on the amount of viewers that was there. There could also be some kind of agreement that they had control over the redistribution afterward, in case they would prefer to take it down. Once redistributed by someone external, that's no longer possible.

To this day I still boycott anything Metallica. I loved Napster and would run out and buy CDs to support the artists. This makes me happy, but doubt they even care.

> I loved Napster and would run out and buy CDs to support the artists. You realize how self-centered this is, right? How it isn't indicative of the general public? This is like saying "I love drunk driving. I live in Alaska where there's no one around so there's no one I can hurt."

no, that comparison doesn't really work. If your buisness model requires large scale censorship of the internet to remain profitable, then your buisness model is broken. This was true in the 90s where downloading a few thousand mp3s was the most you could get out of your modem and it's true today for complete 4k blueray rips. Spotify and co have obliterated music piracy on the internet. It's hard to find torrents for music these days and even the best private trackers can't compete with Spotifys ever growing catalog. Add to that the availability of Spotify on linux, android and basically every other device that has a DAC in my household and i wouldn't even bother trying to pirate music anymore. There was a time, when this was true for netflix, or at least it felt true to a degree. But the movie and tv industry chose to split their catalog between an ever growing number of competing offers, thus movie piracy is alive and well. The same is true for most games these days. Why bother pirating a game, requiring complicated installation, slow download speeds and a lack of updates when i can buy it on steam and get the convenience of fast downloads, automatic updates, reliable only gameplay etc.? The reality is that copying bits of data has become so trivial, it's impossible to monetize it. That's why everything's a SaaS in the cloud these days. Trying to restrict that is a fools errand at best. For piracy to die, it has to become inconvenient and the legal alternatives have to be priced reasonable.

>Spotify and co have obliterated music piracy on the internet. It's hard to find torrents for music these days and even the best private trackers can't compete with Spotifys ever growing catalog. Eh? Maybe it depends on a musical genre, but from my experience musical piracy is about as popular as it ever was, with a lot of new releases every day (although I admit that it didn't really grow). I can still find anything I'm interested in less than a minute. I also think, that having your own musical library is more convenient than spotify. As an example - https://ibb.co/VLTh5fD and https://ibb.co/fnxnMmG

Lately I'm starting to miss the utility of MP3's because reasons. So haven't tried it yet, but it seems pretty trivial to pirate from Spotify, just a bit of a time suck to play an album/playlist, chop up the tracks, look up the metadata. There are tools to make all of this easier, virtual audio patch cables, audacity, metadata downloaders. No?

Is it? I've been unsuccessful so far with the obvious exception of ripping the output stream and reencoding that. If you find a way to rip music from spoitfy, i'd be interested

yeah that will probably work but since spotify is already sending a lossy compressed audio file, you'll still get some quality loss due to compressing it twice. Also seems really inconvenient, especially since i'd want to do this for mobile use to save on bandwidth. That quickly becomes really annoying if you want to do it for thousands of files.

Yep it works fine. Three basic steps - 1) configure your environment; 2) record; 3) process. Steps 1 & 3 take the most effort here, but once set up you don't really have to sweat over any of it again. Step 2 takes the most duration since it's realtime. But the cool thing is there's no DAC happening. 1) Configure Environment * In Spotify set quality to Very High (nominally 320kbps) * Using some virtual patch cabling (I use Voice Meeter Banana), set Windows to use it's VAIO input as the Spotify output device. * Make sure B1 channel (the virtual output) is enabled in VMB * Set A1 channel (hardware out) in VMB to your speakers if you want to monitor music, otherwise set to nothing if you want it to do all this in the background * Set Audacity to to use the VAIO Output as the recording source 2) Record * hit play in spotify, hit record in audacity * Audacity should stop recording after prolonged silence when playlist ends - you can tweak the sensitivity of this. 3) Process * Select all in Audacity, then Analyze/Detect Sounds, set silence threshold to whatever (e.g. -60). Spot check your results for accuracy. * Export this track list from Audacity (txt file) * Use a tool like https://watsonbox.github.io/exportify to export your playlist details from Spotify (csv file) * Use Excel or Python (or whatever your hammer of choice is) to merge your spotify playlist data with the audacity label export file, basically creating a new label file for audacity. For example, your audacity label name could be "artist-trackname". * Import your new label file to update the track names; * "Export Multiple" from Audacity using track name as file name. * Use some media management tool to clean up and download all the metadata for the file. I used MediaMonkey for this. Basically imported detecting artist and track name from filename, then let it do its thing to look up additional metadata and album covers.

All this talk is probably going to force me to try it this weekend cuz science, right? I don't know if I'd really notice quality[0] degradation too much, my use case would be the local storage in my vehicle for long trips with dodgy cell coverage. I've been burned a couple times by Spotify auto-clearing previously downloaded playlists, only to find out after I'm without data coverage / in the air. I have a couple ideas about making the process more efficient, as in process running in the background. You are essentially restricted to a 1x rip speed, but I shouldn't think I'd need to babysit it much and the post processing can be largely automated, perhaps less time than I remember it taking to find equivalent torrents, dl and clean those up. I mean, duration would be longer but level of effort on par or less. Will report back. [0] https://support.spotify.com/us/article/high-quality-streamin...

Yes I am making that comparison. It is a reducto ad absurdium argument. I skipped all the steps where I illustrate the value of copyright law and the value of music and then draw a parallel between "but I buy the CDs" with "but I don't hurt anyone".

I didn't endanger people when "pirating" Metallica's (well, ACDC and Twisted Sisters rather) CDs when i was younger (and a lot poorer, single unqualified mom in a small city and all that). Emule and bittorent helped me get access to a culture i didn't even know existed, brought me awy from TV shows and helped me learn english and to books i now own. I'm sorry for Butcher, Feist and Sanderson early years, but i think i have the whole collection now, and i couldn't afford to buy those books anyway (i don't think i could even find them in my country) Drunk driving just made me gain 40 minutes while probably endangering a dozen people (and i immediately stopped after the first time). Also every time i buy storage i pay a tax to Universal and other CP owner while not having any licenced music (unless they own Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Pachelbel, and a lot of pre-63 music in general) on those storage. Also they should give 40% of that tax to the Linux foundation since packer and weird images are taking almost half my disk space? Anyway, i know how prod works, more than half of them are parasites and don't add any value (well, not exactly, they add their daddy political connections, that's something). It does not surprise me, what is surprising to me is that this many people defend them.

One of those deprives someone of some money(maybe, if they would have bought the CD otherwise), the other has a real chance to kill or maim. You really don't do your cause any favors with the absurd arguments. As someone else brought up, the you wouldn't download a car type arguments only get you ridicule.

The music industry cartel made me pay them for empty cd's and such, no moral issue for me.

It reminded me of those silly "you wouldn't download a car" anti-piracy ads

By the color of your comment I think it is not self-centered, a lot of people agree with that.

Basically I'm stating that I think it's fallacious to use your own willingness to support artists in your value judgement of copyright policy.

Awesome, it was Metallica who started the whole nonsense behind today's state of DMCA. Finally getting some taste of their own medicine.

Maybe they'd need to be paid twice - is there a way to license the music for online streaming? And was it done as part of the contract in this case?

Metallica is probably not in it for the $ much these days. I'd wager it's more about ego, so this probably stung. Deservedly.

As a teenager, I thought I had a right to enjoy their work without paying for it. But this attitude surprises me from adults. Why don't bands deserve to be paid for their product?

I wasn't aware Metallica ever rootkit'd anybody? I already knew about the Sony incident that you linked.

The point is that efforts to prevent piracy, pushed by Metallica and obviously the recording companies at large, can be harmful, and it's possible to want to support artists but to prefer that they don't take measures which actively hurt consumers. This is the same community that really hates ebook lending, and it's very much the same set of consumer-limiting control over intellectual property that curtails piracy but also makes things really inconvenient for the legitimate customer. I'm surprised but also not that people aren't able to think about this as more than a (false) dichotomy.

Again, Metallica did not rootkit anybody. How are they hurting legitimate consumers of their work? Rootkits are not mere inconveniences, they are intentional data breaches. Obviously spreading mis-information using this particular false example is going to distort peoples' understandings of Metallica's actual stance and actions. Hacking consumers directly vs. using the court system to shut down an illegal piracy application is a very real dichotomy. Properly implemented DRM is fine! Spotify has been a huge success, for example. Watching Netflix fully brings the convenience of streaming to legal content consumption. The only inconvenience here is that you can no longer pirate anything.

I wouldn't say that DRM is 'fine'. For example there is no legal way to watch my blu-ray movies on my PC, on which I use Linux. Similarly Netflix 4K doesn't work at all on Linux or even on Windows unless you are using a specific web browser.

Oh, right amazing point - it hadn't even floated to the top of my memory that I can't actually even pay anybody to watch Netflix if I'm using the wrong operating system. DRM utopia, indeed.

> Again, Metallica did not rootkit anybody. And, to use a facile and touchy example, Donald Trump didn't revolt at the capital. But fine: > what is a very real dichotomy Help me out here - why are the only two choices: 1. rampant piracy 2. automated systems that allow corporations to trivially take down content, legitimate or not, with generally no recourse unless you get e.g. Google's attention on twitter? Why are people so convinced there's no middle ground here, and that everybody with an opinion that #2 is perhaps a little problematic must be totally pro-piracy? > Properly implemented DRM is fine! Perhaps the argument is that we don't yet live in the land of properly implemented IP controls. I didn't realize we'd reached utopia; I'll go back to buying ebooks and reusing them across whatever devices I please. Spotify and Netflix are great examples of exactly proof that a convenient form of consumption will get paying customers, and I was certainly more willing to buy MP3s when they stopped coming with DRM attached to them. The fact these work does not somehow render the point that, well, the original article, occurs, as a result of these things, and that it's ironic that it happens to Metallica, who would probably prior to this have been pleased that an automated system takes down anything approximating Enter Sandman.

You originally stated that Metallica rootkitted people. That's a ridiculous wholly non-analogous example. Trump clearly incited the riot, there were recordings as proof, and resultant court cases. I assume (and hope) that this is also your understanding of what actually happened with Trump. In this case, it doesn't even come close. For example, Metallica wasn't even signed on the record label that did the rootkit. Metallica had literally no involvement any hacking of their fans' operating systems. You're stating a different dichotomy now. The original one you proposed was whether it is possible to be against online piracy without attacking consumers' data. I'm happy to entertain your other more reasonable arguments that you have later written as follow-ups, but your original post directly accusing Metallica of rootkits is just flat-out untrue.

> That's a ridiculous wholly non-analogous example. Trump clearly incited the riot, there were recordings as proof, and resultant court cases. In this case, it doesn't even come close. I'm just making the point that Metallica not rootkitting anybody is in no way an argument that they are neither in favor of that drastic a measure nor that they did not encourage or provide justification for the recording industry to do the same. > You originally stated that Metallica rootkitted people. No, I made a leap from "lobbying for and publicly whining about piracy" to "efforts to curb that include rootkits and other less horrible inconveniences". I'm sorry if that leap felt too extreme, next time I'll make the pit stops along the lines of "things don't work offline" and "things disappear without you knowing" and "things using otherwise standard formats aren't readable on your non-blessed device". Whether Metallica directly rootkitted anything (which was never stated, it was just juxtaposed as an example of how this POV can hurt consumers in the end) doesn't really matter. Let's pretend that nobody ever rootkitted anybody. How is this dichotomy different? My original, according to you: > The original one you proposed was whether it is possible to be against online piracy without attacking consumers' data. My recent restating: > Help me out here - why are the only two choices: 1. rampant piracy 2. automated systems that allow corporations to trivially take down content, legitimate or not, with generally no recourse unless you get e.g. Google's attention on twitter? Hm. Option 1 is online piracy, 2 is attacking consumers' data. Sounds pretty similar? Or do I need to be really literal and exact and use the same words?

Your arguments on this whole thing are completely nonsensical. None of what you're claiming to be mad about has anything to do with Metallica. You're basically complaining that you can't freely use the work of artists without compensating them.

I'm not, and I'm sorry that you struggle to see anything but black and white. I'm not complaining about paying artists. The ability to pay them is 100% unrelated to the complaint that enforcement technologies can harm the consumer. I'm sorry that you're not seeing that, but I'm not sure how much more explaining can possibly help here. If you can find a sentence from me that, anywhere, says or even implies "I shouldn't have to pay for music/tv/ebooks", I'll be shocked. I'm glad you came back after your nonsensical police parallel to make this comment, though.

Metallica lobbied and was publicly the face of anti-piracy sentiment, and are therefore very much responsible for my issues AND their own, in this scenario.

well the industry corrected itself by pushing a la carte subscription music services which is what the freedom fighters hate but it turns out it's exactly what the people wanted all along.

Nobody said it's what the people wanted all along. I miss the days where my songs don't just disappear from Spotify because they renegotiated a contract. But there's no risk of being sued and it's cheap enough so it's easy to subscribe even if it's not your preferred solution

I think it's pretty valid to want to pay a price for music, and then take that file wherever you go, without having to reconnect to update a license (I both pay for a subscription to Spotify and mp3s a la carte). Of course, that's also available today, but that's not really relevant to the problem being discussed, which is: it's possible to want to pay artists, while also finding overzealous enforcement of the DMCA problematic.

I don't think so. You have no right to ownership just because you buy the song. You didn't commission it, you didn't write it, produce it, market it, and so on. All you did was pay a couple dollars. In effect, all you're doing is buying a license to play the song for personal use, not the right to keep the file forever.

This is a weird take. There are stores that literally grant you that right, today. I'm pretty sure that even in the US, a court is not going to grant a musician the right to force you to delete the MP3s you bought off Amazon music. What is the basis for your belief that you don't have a right to the file you bought? Or are you disagreeing with the existence of stores that operate that way? Or with... basically the entire history of hard copy distribution, like cassettes, CDs, vinyl...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-your-digital-download... Amazon actually will delete music from your hard drive. 5. Reservation of Rights Except for the rights explicitly granted to you in the Terms of Use, all right, title and interest in the Service, the Software and the Digital Content are reserved and retained by us, our Digital Content providers, and our licensors. You do not acquire any ownership rights in the Software or Digital Content as a result of downloading Software or Digital Content. And yeah I do disagree with the license of hard copy distribution. I don't think just because I buy a book I can do whatever I want, even burning it. I really think the supposed harm to consumers is vastly exaggerated in HN; on the other hand, the harm to artists and creators is serious, especially to those without the privilege of patronage.

That article spends its whole time talking about whether you can transfer the rights. From your source, for example: You may copy, store, and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use. All of the agreements cited are pretty clear that you can copy and store the bytes for your own use. I agree with the thrust that "purchasing" music is certainly weirder with these overreaching legal agreements (and I think it's more fraught when it comes to video or video games), but I disagree with the perspective that: A) That this is a lease of the music B) That that condition is justified because you didn't create an exclusive commission. It seemed to me that, legality aside (and forgive me if I'm misunderstanding), you were asserting that customers have no business expecting indefinite access to an MP3 they paid for, and I... disagree, but if the recording industry wants that to be the case, they're welcome to yet another scenario where pirates have a better customer experience than paying customers. Blech, an edit: What I have seen that applied to is subscription-based music, where the license agreement around whether that song is available for subscription changes. Is there an example of this happening to a "purchased "song or album? I've never seen an effort by a publisher to reclaim hard-drive-bound songs that have been paid for (and I imagine spicy legal cases about expecting refunds). Edit again: I realize I'm sort of meandering. My point is only that it's not unreasonable to expect that, I agree that licensing agreements for digital purchases of all kinds have surprising details about what you actually "own".

Lol give me time to respond, I've already changed my post ten times. Jk, I don't care. Thanks for arguing in good faith, that's not something that ever happens in this forum, I do appreciate that. E: Like i said, I do think that unless you explicitly buy the rights to a song, you don't own it, you're leasing it. Probably the only reason (judging by music lawyers behavior) to have the ability to a sort of ownership to physical media is because they had no way of stopping you from doing anything you want with your copy. Of course, that's a different story today, I'm sure given a time machine, that would not have been a precedent. So that's why I don't like the argument from prior precedents, since it would not repeat given current tech.

It's good to be reminded what we actually agree to. I find mp3 purchasing kind of hairy because it is certainly presented as a "buy" transaction rather than a lease. This is also true of video games and app stores, and then we get into fun situations where your google account gets banned for some reason and you lose, with no refund, all the apps you bought... I feel like the harm is great! I am also sympathetic to the "creators'" perspective. How can you make a profit if people take whatever you made without compensation? I think part of my cynicism here is that the recording industry has long exaggerated and argued in poor faith about what the harm of a download is - conflating downloads with lost sales at a 1:1 rate, which... isn't quite right. And their approach for securing things can be problematic, I remember having a hell of a time with iTunes back with their DRM solution, hating that I couldn't just play the song I had paid for. If only I'd pirated from the start... I think there's some axes along which things could be improved - the convenience axis - can I even buy (access to) the song without jumping through hoops? Can I pay to skip ads on whatever platform I'm using? How many different accounts do I need to get access to the music I'd like? Edit: Agreed, I think if they can get away with having control at all times with the music you have available, they will... and it's hard for me to decide whether there will be backlash or just general acceptance in the same vein as the rest of the walled garden trends we've seen over the years.

What's special about CDs or books in this sense compared to any other product? When I buy most other products I am not purchasing just a unilaterally withdrawable lease to use them in a manner controllable by the manufacturer. If I purchase a Gucci handbag, I can do whatever I want with it even though it contains Gucci's trademark IP. It would be surreal for Gucci to be allowed to control what I wear it with, for example, or later take it off me. Nonetheless, owning the handbag does not give me ownership of their IP and it wouldn't make it legal for me to sell counterfeit copies of it.

But that implies you own the song, which you don't. You're always leasing access to the song. Just because you pay a couple dollars doesn't mean you get to listen to it forever.

Already asked this, but where are you getting this interpretation? Not only is it now how most license agreements for music stores read today, it's also simply unreasonable.

> Why don't bands deserve to be paid for their product? The presentation suggests that Metallica goes unpaid for their product. I suspect there are many fat bank deposits that indicate otherwise. What I feel is more important is that the assertion obfuscates the primary motivation in play. Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. This government-granted privilege isn't one that's enjoyed by the vast bulk of producers. Worse, copyright gatekeepers have twisted the constitutional purpose of copyright - from encouraging the progress of science and the useful arts - into a pampered entitlement of never-ending profit.

> Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. No, this is not a story of the evil capitalist overlord oppressing the little guy. Save the hero narrative. Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. The good news is there are actually a lot of them who don't, and that's their personal decision. You're allowed to take it for free if they set their price at zero, but you're not allowed to set their price at zero for them.

> Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. Broke bands aren't who are paying legislators for ever-racheting copyright laws - each of which comes at the public's expense and further betrays the bargain between copyright holders and the public. and - Corruption fueled copyright laws tend to favor powerful, wealthy gatekeepers (by design). For everyone else there are far better methodologies to making a living. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-b...

There are cases where it's less important for bands to be paid for their music than it is to not sue children and not cripple consumer technology.

How exactly does what happened here -- hundreds of streams, including the official Twitch stream, muting themselves to avoid losing their careers or getting sued for absurd amounts of money -- contribute to bands getting paid?

Lets say that all of the earths water becomes polluted except for an infinite well that only you have access to. Do you not have the right to get paid for it? Shouldn't you get paid something like the value added to humanity? So, everything? You should get paid everything? What if the situation were different, and there where billions of people searching for infinite wells when all of the water became polluted and you were the lucky one to find it. Do you deserve everything now? How else were you supposed to have been incentivized to search for infinite wells if not for the possibility that everything would be yours upon finding it. Alright, what if it weren't water? What if it were something that, instead of keeping you alive, just made life worth living? I reckon you probably couldn't get everything for it, but surely you could get a lot. Does that seem like a bad system to you? I tell you what. I have a lot of money, I'll pay you to go searching for the infinite well of happiness (you can't survive on credit forever), and in exchange, it becomes mine when you find it, and then I can sell it for everything. The premise that monopoly rights on distribution are necessary to incentivize the searching is pretty severely undermined by the fact that those monopoly rights are aggregated by companies which incentivize the searching via other means.

You're comparing a routine transaction of paying someone for their performance, to an unrealistic hypothetical involving the monopolization of a critical resource required to survive more than 3 days. It's hard to take that argument seriously. You're misusing the word monopoly. Everyone has a monopoly on their own labor. But they don't have a monopoly on music, and neither does Metallica. You're not entitled to a man's song and dance under any circumstances that don't involve him entering into a mutually agreeable transaction with you. If this makes life not worth living, hopefully you can find someone else willing to accept your offer of giving them nothing in exchange for it. If you can't, well, tough shit I guess. You still don't deserve it for free. It's not Lars' problem if you will die without his music.

I'm not talking about a transaction where someone performs for me, that's not what copyright refers to, I'm talking about an infinite well. And the comparison was between any infinite well and an infinite well of water. Granting someone scarcity rights on an unscarce resources is inefficient. Society would, instantaneously, produce a lot more value if all of the things that were free to reproduce were reproduced at the quantity demanded. The question of copyright has ALWAYS been one of incentive, and I think my argument to that point is pretty clear. Further, I am not misusing the word monopoly. Copyright is precisely monopoly distribution rights.

no no no they're supposed to give their music away for free and then make money on concert tickets and t-shirts

That's essentially what most musicians end up doing when they stream on platforms like Spotify.

People just can't let something from 21 years ago go, can they? The band's done a complete 180 on everything regarding digital distribution, and it's been this way for years (I'm sure owning their masters and own label has something to do with it). You want a real culprit who actually thoroughly abused (and still to this day) the DMCA? Get mad at the RIAA. Also, if it weren't Metallica, it would have been someone else; virtually every big artist at the time felt the same way but didn't speak up.

I think many people don't buy their "complete 180", as that only came after their massively failed campaign. I have no doubt that if these guys were successful in their initial endeavor there would have never been a 180 as you call it. So really, there's not much to praise about a group who tried their hardest to do the wrong thing, and settled for the alternative when they failed measurably. Glad this happened to them, well deserved.

They maybe did an 180, but they did not undo what they did, the effects are visible today and they are at fault. No, people cannot just let something go in such circumstances.

> People just can't let something from 21 years ago go, can they? Tell that to the media industries lobbying to extend copyright terms to virtually infinite duration. The "something" they can't let go of from 21 years ago is the copyright on the material, of course.

Not sure why are you downvoted. It's hard to find a similarly popular band sharing more stuff online for free these days than Metallica. Besides, the entire Napster thing was about a song "I Disappear" being available through Napster BEFORE it was even finished and sent to CD manufacturing, and, don't forget, it all happened in 2000. It has not been on their radar for about 20 years now. Hating based on skimming headlines of inaccurate articles is surely easier than trying to understand the band's motives.

I guarantee you people still volunteer their time to bootleg anything this band does on the internet, forever.

As artists, why shouldn't Metallica get paid for their work? I can't believe the audacity of people thinking they should just be able to steal others' (by virtue of copying) music. The people I know in the music industry are some of the hardest working that I know... And to be clear, Metallica was never against online streaming / downloading, only illegal piracy.

Because fair use laws exist and educators like Rick Beato get screwed by these over-censoring algorithms.

Piracy isn't stealing, it may be illegal, but it does not fit the definition of stealing. Saying piracy is theft, is an antiquated line of thinking that anyone with common knowledge of digital products knows to be false.

Not the person you're replying to, but "steal" has been used in that sense for a long, long time—also long before the internet—e.g. "stealing ideas", so arguably it fits the definition just fine.

"Stealing ideas" is also incorrect. A long running misconception doesn't make it not a misconception.

Come on. Following that logic you'll be hard pressed to speak a full meaningful sentence about a topic because, not surprisingly, language evolves! "Steal" has been used as "copy" long enough that it's part of the standard usage now (and has been for a long time), just like "literally" being used as an intensifier, or "cool" meaning "good" as opposed to referring strictly to temperature. And it's likely not even a misconception (like "a napron" => "an apron" was) but rather a conceptual metaphor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor), which is what helps you understand that you shouldn't be afraid of cutting yourself on someone's "sharp wit", and that you don't need to bring a ladder shopping even though "prices are rising". Hell, even "conception" (as in "misconception") was originally only used for talking about literal pregnancies, the metaphorical extension didn't come about until the 14th century (source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/conception). Or is that okay? If so, how old does a semantic extensions have to be to be accepted into the lexicon?

> not surprisingly, language evolves! It sure does, did I say otherwise or was that just the easiest straw-man you could attack? I contend the word in its current form is evolved to not include piracy. Not surprisingly, evolution of language can go many ways, not just the way which supports your argument. Cheers!

First, it's only a strawman if you think accepted cognitive metaphor theory is wrong and the concrete form of "steal"/"theft" did not come before the more abstract mappings... And are you really saying that "steal" has evolved away from also including "stealing ideas" and similar (including "piracy")? Because that's demonstrably false simply by pointing to the original argument you made complaining that people are using "steal" in the "wrong" way. I'm curious, though, do you have some data to back up that claim? (I'm assuming no—or something anecdotal at best—but on the off chance you have something, please, share!) You are aware that general use defines language and what's considered correct, right? How you feel about it as an individual doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things unless you manage to affect general usage of the term "steal" to no longer include "piracy". You're obviously not arguing in good faith—e.g. by cherry-picking what you respond to (out of context even ... while missing the point) while completely ignoring other arguments. I'll refrain from taking further part in the discussion if that pattern continues because it's frankly a waste of time and effort.

So, blizzard tries to team up with Metallica to garner publicity after some fairly terrible publicity only to have Metallica's stream removed from the most popular game streaming service currently existing due to DMCA and now it's gotten them both negative publicity. I feel like there's some irony buried in there somewhere...

> Several commenters online have pointed out the irony of this happening to Metallica. The band, particularly drummer Lars Ulrich, has been heavily critical of online music sharing, and the band had a high-profile case with Napster back in 2000. Is that not the opposite of ironic?

I watched the stream on YouTube and the audio was kept as is. I doubt it would be the same for the VOD later but, couldn't Twitch do the same? Also, isn't Blizzard or Twitch breaking their ToS by simultaneously streaming on Twitch and YouTube?

It wasn't just Twitch's platform: it was Twitch's own channel /twitchgaming. On YouTube, Blizzard just streamed it to their own channel, and they've surely cleared the rights (for now).

I don't believe there are any ToS covering simultaneous streaming on Twitch and YouTube for either service.

Partnered streamers sign away co streaming rights to become partners and get those benefits. For most streamers, they want a community and costreaming does the opposite of that For super large events having a split works. Large events aren't usually partners in the typical sense

Even if there was a tos issue, I'm sure blizzcon will be on their own contracts for this kind of stuff

How come Twitch aka Amazon can't solve this DMCA problem like Youtube aka Google? What does Google do differently than Amazon?

YouTube has built out a monetization platform which makes music companies want to have their music on YouTube. Twitch has nothing remotely comparable, and somehow I don't think streamers would be happy with a YouTube-like solution of "any sub money made while you're playing music go to that song's rights holder instead of you".

They do a lot of things differently. This doesn't prevent problems from happening, but it does create a likelihood that the problems will be different. Google/YouTube does demonetization, but keeps the video streaming as is. That makes sense for their platform, but it creates a host of other problems.

The Youtube stream was not muted. The VOD was not muted. Everyone else uploading the video cut of the song is not muted and removed. They are demonetized but the video is up with the original sound. So yes Youtube does something differently than Twitch where everyone deletes VODs asap or they replace the sound (like what happened on their own official channel)

> we have to imagine the band is "madly in anger" with Twitch over the fiasco No, we don't. It's unlikely they care.

The irony is the only thing about this event that is noteworthy. The attempts at humor (album title) beyond that fall flat, but YMMV. Regardless, that quote was the heart of the assertion from a non-story.

Something tells me someone at Twitch knew this was going to happen and let this transpire as a fuck you to Metallica and DMCA. Metallica is widely known as one of the absolute worst bands for cracking down on small creators for using any amount of their content. They ended Napster and pushed back against digital music for years. Absolutely love the band, but they just don't get it. Same for a lot of the best older bands too (Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, KISS, etc.)

This is karma for all the pain caused to independent artists by copyright censorship "AI".

The online world is controlled almost entirely by buggy algorithms that have been given a lot of impactful decision making power. This sort of thing happens so often. Usually, it's a permaban of an individual user for undisclosed reasons and without the possibility of reaching support

An idea for Twitch: 1) Allow you to link your Amazon Music/Spotify/whatever account to your Twitch account to prove that you are licensed to stream songs from a given platform. 2) Allow a streamer to provide a 2nd audio channel in their bitstream, from their choice of service. You then only deliver this 2nd audio channel to people that have a link in place to said service Simples. Probably needs rights geolocation checking adding

Twitch is already adding 2nd, separate music tracks, via Twitch Soundtrack[1]. They have negotiated their own licensing of some music catalogs for use here. The article mentions "sync" rights, which is the right to have music accompanying a video system. So in your system the user having the right to listen to the music is not enough. In this hell-hole shit-world the RIAA & MPAA & others have created, there are endless infinite licenses & they all require brutally disgusting carefully negotiated licenses, each & every time. What terrible people. The legalese continually gums of the creative & cultural works of our society, causes endless nightmares & prohibitions. The systems seem to only grow in complexity & become ever more inhumane. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/12/21562372/twitch-soundtra...

lot of hypocrisy from Twitch amazon has enough money to pay for rights to play the music and twitch streamers are also full of sh:t, they are the one who refuses their clips to be reused by people on youtube, and when it comes to people's music, they want to be able to freely use them I never liked this twitch community, they are very toxic and they take everything for granted!

Clearly overlaid with the wrong music. It should have been a string quartet of very very tiny violins playing a sad song.

They were obviously playing pre-recorded music otherwise it wouldn't have been a match, which is actually even funnier

Given that the message was > The upcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder (emphasis mine), this was configured manually by a human before the performance even started.

Does Blizard Livestream Blizzcon on Twitch

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204691

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