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Old 08-07-2014, 07:03 PM   #1
Jerichi
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Data, Copyright & The Internet, ft. Twitch.TV

So if you pay any attention to speedrunning or pro gaming, you've probably caught wind of Twitch's recent changes to VODs (videos-on-demand). Much like YouTube, they recently enacted a muting policy for copyrighted material, and also severely limited the VODs' lifespan, forcing users who wish to keep their VODs to make highlight reels, which are limited to two hours. For a site dedicated to streaming video and not video storage, this seems like kind of not a big deal.

But this is the Internet, so that is never the case. And to make matters worse, the Twitch CEO was doing a very poorly timed AMA on Reddit. Here's the relevant thread, and the related drama thread.

The speedrunning community, for one, immediately blew up. But the crown jewel, and perhaps best summary of the general sentiment, is this open letter to Twitch, posted by cosmowright, current holder of the OoT world record and pretty Internet Famous speedrunner. Cosmo, someone who has long been a proponent for Twitch, is threatening to change streaming services over these policy changes. His post, tl;dr, points to the limiting of VODs as seriously crippling the ability for speedrunners to archive their runs, especially considering many go over 2 hours and are not easily posted to YouTube due to copyright issues. He also accuses Twitch of some hypocrisy, considering the service may also mute videos for in-game music (as already seen in a popular GTA streamer's VODs, and, somewhat hilariously, a DOTA2 stream recording streamed by none other than Valve themselves, who owns DOTA2's copyright).

There's much, much more drama surrounding this, but I think this lays a nice base for a discussion about the changing layout of the Internet. In a world where copyright is becoming less and less relevant and people are actively fighting to circumvent or overturn it, where do content providers fit into this? How can this be managed effectively, giving consumers what they want and giving artists the revenue they deserve?

On a somewhat unrelated note, what about data and information storage? Are all sites with user-generated content now expected to store as much information as humanly possible? How practical is that?

Discuss.
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Old 08-07-2014, 09:37 PM   #2
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerichi View Post
In a world where copyright is becoming less and less relevant and people are actively fighting to circumvent or overturn it, where do content providers fit into this? How can this be managed effectively, giving consumers what they want and giving artists the revenue they deserve?
To me personally, content providers don't have a market. If I can't pirate a product, in most cases I don't care about it enough to buy it legitimately. There's far, far too many free-access options competing for my attention to invest actual money into something I would probably be embarrassed to be discovered enjoying. Traditional business models need to be modified to accommodate for the mass of competition on the internet.

This may be a case of a "cart before the horse", but for example, my plans for my visual novel: I want to release it free of charge under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, which allows people to do anything to it - even profit off parody and the like - so long as they acknowledge the original work. For myself, I'm considering opening donations so if someone wants to reward me for enjoying the work, they have that option and are by no means pressured or forced into paying for something. The idea with this is to maximize exposure, and consumer surplus - the benefit to me was my own enjoyment at producing the novel and hearing what others think about it.

The money is just a bonus, but there are several advantages to doing things this way:

-I don't have someone telling me what to do
-There isn't any kind of demographic or audience I'm conforming to, so I have ultimate creative flexibility
-If I receive a donation, I'm rewarded for a job well done, rather than forcing someone to pay for access to a work they may or may not enjoy

Obviously, this model doesn't really succeed well at establishing video game creation as a career (as, in fact, I am using my own personal funds to make it happen, and the primary intent is personal entertainment and not profit) but in my view this seems like the best way to make money off works in the Web 2.0 era. The personal cost can be mitigated by crowdfunding.
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Old 08-07-2014, 09:58 PM   #3
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I definitely think the 2 hour limit on VODs is pretty insane. Twitch.tv knows a major portion of it's market are viewers of eSports and the gaming community in general. Two hours isn't nearly long enough for most events, let alone the average video time of gaming sessions.
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Old 08-07-2014, 11:15 PM   #4
Talon87
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerichi View Post
So if you pay any attention to speedrunning or pro gaming, you've probably caught wind of Twitch's recent changes to VODs (videos-on-demand). Much like YouTube, they recently enacted a muting policy for copyrighted material, and also severely limited the VODs' lifespan, forcing users who wish to keep their VODs to make highlight reels, which are limited to two hours. For a site dedicated to streaming video and not video storage, this seems like kind of not a big deal.

But this is the Internet, so that is never the case. And to make matters worse, the Twitch CEO was doing a very poorly timed AMA on Reddit. Here's the relevant thread, and the related drama thread.

The speedrunning community, for one, immediately blew up. But the crown jewel, and perhaps best summary of the general sentiment, is this open letter to Twitch, posted by cosmowright, current holder of the OoT world record and pretty Internet Famous speedrunner. Cosmo, someone who has long been a proponent for Twitch, is threatening to change streaming services over these policy changes. His post, tl;dr, points to the limiting of VODs as seriously crippling the ability for speedrunners to archive their runs, especially considering many go over 2 hours and are not easily posted to YouTube due to copyright issues. He also accuses Twitch of some hypocrisy, considering the service may also mute videos for in-game music (as already seen in a popular GTA streamer's VODs, and, somewhat hilariously, a DOTA2 stream recording streamed by none other than Valve themselves, who owns DOTA2's copyright).

There's much, much more drama surrounding this, but I think this lays a nice base for a discussion about the changing layout of the Internet. In a world where copyright is becoming less and less relevant and people are actively fighting to circumvent or overturn it, where do content providers fit into this? How can this be managed effectively, giving consumers what they want and giving artists the revenue they deserve?

On a somewhat unrelated note, what about data and information storage? Are all sites with user-generated content now expected to store as much information as humanly possible? How practical is that?

Discuss.
First: Twitch having been purchased by YouTube, we really shouldn't be surprised by the numerous ways in which the younger is being made to match the older. With that prefaced ...

On the topic of muting copyrighted material: they have to do it to cover their own asses. Also, YouTube already does this so it's no surprise.

On the topic of 2-hour videos: I guess I don't understand. Are you saying that videos hosted on the server after the stream has ended are limited to two hours in length? Or are you saying that even live streams themselves will be cut off once the 120-minute mark is reached? People seem to me to be talking about it like it's the latter, but I got the impression from your post that it's the former. Assuming it is the former, then my position is that this really shouldn't matter much anyway as we push forward. Twitch having been bought by YouTube, any streamers who prefer Twitch to YouTube for monetary reasons are going to find those reasons disappearing soon (if they haven't already) anyway. My point then being, if you're a streamer who uses Twitch.tv to stream 6-hour gaming sessions, then YouTube already exists to offer you a place where you can upload that 6-hour video later for everyone to see. Granted, you need to earn the privilege to upload a video that long. But that shouldn't be too much trouble, I would think, for most serious streamers. If nothing else, you can divide the video up into multiple parts. "Click here for Part 1!", a two-hour video. "Click here for Part 2!", another two-hour video. Just chain them together and you can de facto have any stream you like on YouTube, no matter the length.

On the topic of Cosmo trying to throw his weight around: I think this will only hurt him more than it will help him. Twitch has been pretty kind to Cosmo, and to all of the other Nintendo speedrunners, when they could just as easily have reported to NoA the ones who have on camera used ROMs and other illegal software. For him to bite the hand that has fed him like this ... especially when that hand is now attached to YouTube's body, and YouTube doesn't give a shit who tiny little Cosmo is ... it's kind of silly. I mean ... even if PewDiePie threatened to leave YouTube for, say, Vimeo or DailyMotion or some such, I don't think YouTube would bend over backwards to keep him. They're the ones who did him the favor, not the other way around. I mean, sure, he brings millions of views every day to their site which translates to ad revenue (... in theory). But if PewDiePie disappears, there will be ten more just like him ready to take his place. YouTube doesn't need PewDiePie nearly as much as PewDiePie needs YouTube. I feel like it's the same way with Twitch and Cosmo. The two had a nice thing going. Now Cosmo's decided to throw it away in a desperate bid to prevent the inevitable from taking place. It's futile and it could cost him his enterprise. I dunno. We'll see.

On the topic of whether I think let's plays and speed runs should be covered by copyright or not: it's a complex issue. I will say that I believe that a number of factors give some let's plays a stronger position than others. Game companies argue that LPs and speed run videos hurt their sales. Enthusiasts argue the opposite. Who is right is difficult to say -- I think it varies from viewer to viewer whether an LP sates their hunger or whether it whets their appetite further. But I think the following factors tend to tip the scale more one way or another, depending:
  • Is the LP generating revenue? Y/N
  • Is the LP turning a profit for the LPer? Y/N
  • How much of the game does the LP cover?
  • How competent is the run?
  • What is the technical quality of the video?
  • Does the LPer bring something to the table that would hold up in a trial by jury as being something no one else can offer quite like the LPer does?
  • Did the LPer ask for permission from the copyright holder(s)?
For example, Nintendo enjoys a positive relationship with Fuji TV's Game Center CX. Iwata himself has shown up as a guest star on the show numerous times and played alongside Arino. Yet this is the same company who pressured YouTube into temporarily re-routing the profits from any videos featuring Nintendo software to Nintendo's bank account. How can we explain this seemingly night-and-day opposite behavior? I think a big part of it is permission. Fuji Television almost certainly asked for permission to broadcast the games that they broadcast. Most YouTube celebrities almost certainly did not do so at the start of their YouTube careers; and few probably do even now.

But like ... Arino Shinya is clearly making money from his contract with Fuji TV to continue hosting GCCX. The camera crew, the directors, the producer, the entire team at Fuji TV is making money from GCCX to pay the bills. They sell t-shirts, DVDs, mugs ... they've made not one, not two, but three for-profit video games based on the show (though these games all contain original IPs) ... I don't know the legal details, and I don't know if Nintendo, Sega, and the others are getting a cut of the profits or not ... but clearly Nintendo cannot be 100% against a Let's Player making money by playing a Nintendo game for the camera. Not when their chief executive officer goes on GCCX and plays games alongside the host.

How much of the AVGN's pie is Nintendo entitled to? I have no idea. But I will say this: if the AVGN video series were 100% non-profit, then I don't think James Rolfe should even have to ask for permission from Nintendo to make the videos that he's made. Pretty much every other bullet point I listed above he doesn't violate. His only two violations are 1) the $$$ he makes from the videos and 2) the fact that he does so without Nintendo's permission. (Or at least I assume that to have been the case for most of his early career, if not now as well.)

As for speed runners, you can probably tell that I lump them and LPers into the same boat for the purposes of this discussion. I'm sure they object to that. But long post is too long for me to care to explore the subtleties further at this time. ^^; Let's move on, shall we?

On the topic of copyright "becoming less and less relevant": Au contraire, I feel like it's become more and more "relevant" as the copyright holders twist and pervert copyright law all the more strongly in the name of profits.

On the topic of artists "deserving" profit: See below.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Doppleganger View Post
To me personally, content providers don't have a market. If I can't pirate a product, in most cases I don't care about it enough to buy it legitimately. There's far, far too many free-access options competing for my attention to invest actual money into something I would probably be embarrassed to be discovered enjoying. Traditional business models need to be modified to accommodate for the mass of competition on the internet.

This may be a case of a "cart before the horse", but for example, my plans for my visual novel: I want to release it free of charge under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, which allows people to do anything to it - even profit off parody and the like - so long as they acknowledge the original work. For myself, I'm considering opening donations so if someone wants to reward me for enjoying the work, they have that option and are by no means pressured or forced into paying for something. The idea with this is to maximize exposure, and consumer surplus - the benefit to me was my own enjoyment at producing the novel and hearing what others think about it.

The money is just a bonus, but there are several advantages to doing things this way:

-I don't have someone telling me what to do
-There isn't any kind of demographic or audience I'm conforming to, so I have ultimate creative flexibility
-If I receive a donation, I'm rewarded for a job well done, rather than forcing someone to pay for access to a work they may or may not enjoy

Obviously, this model doesn't really succeed well at establishing video game creation as a career (as, in fact, I am using my own personal funds to make it happen, and the primary intent is personal entertainment and not profit) but in my view this seems like the best way to make money off works in the Web 2.0 era. The personal cost can be mitigated by crowdfunding.
Doppel's reply touches on an interesting topic that, depending on the course you wish to take, we could explore here or we could devote a separate discussion thread to. That topic is the extent to which artists (musicians, painters, novelists, etc) make money from their creative works. Briefly, I'll offer this opinion here: I feel like the 20th century was a bubble for art as a career. It began in the early 20th century with Picasso and his contemporaries. Most artists before the 1920s either did not enjoy that degree of fame in life (e.g. Van Gogh) or else led modest lives and did not make that much money off of the their paintings. The 20th century saw the emergence of painters transformed into multimillionaires thanks to their works fetching hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars at auction. It also witnessed the emergence of multimillionaire novelists. Was L. Frank Baum as wealthy as J.K. Rowling? Hardly. How about Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, or Henry David Thoreau? No, no, and no. Whensoever an author was remarkably wealthy, it was usually because he was already a member of the aristocracy, having been born with a silver spoon in mouth. And while Mark Twain did make a considerable amount of money from his works and his traveling lectures, even he was not quite so wealthy as the J.K. Rowlings and the George R. R. Martins of our time.

I don't think the bubble will last much longer. I think it's inevitable that we're going to return to an era of dime novels and people writing more for the passion and the wanting to go down in the history books and less for the indirect attempts at winning the lottery. I'd love to discuss this more ... but maybe next time.
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Old 08-08-2014, 04:50 AM   #5
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Completely agree with Doppel.
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Old 08-26-2014, 01:20 AM   #6
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So, bumping this thread because this just in: Google passes on Twitch; Amazon scoops it up instead. Apparently Google was worried that if they purchased Twitch then they'd have a legal morass on their hands from antitrust litigants. This allowed Amazon.com to step in and say, "How you doin'? " to little ol' Twitch.

So yeah. Thoughts? For all the doom and gloom people were giving about Google acquiring Twitch, I think that Amazon can be expected to run an even tighter ship. Google has long skirted copyright law what with the elephant-in-the-room obvious fact that YouTube contains petabytes of data's worth of unlicensed content; Amazon, on the other hand, has no such history of ever courting piracy. But maybe people who know better than I do can explain why I'm wrong and why with Jeff Bezos at the helm we can expect Twitch to remain truer to its roots than it would have under Google's captaincy.
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Old 08-26-2014, 01:26 AM   #7
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Amazon might not have a history, but a lack of history doesn't imply that they'll be more militant than Google. I'd say it's an interesting move but a good one, since I didn't feel comfortable with Google acquiring Twitch, and Amazon hasn't really struck me as an internet super-power in spite of Kindle's appeal to the common, vulgar, weak, licentious smartphone crowd. This would be a good place to take some steps forward.
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Old 08-26-2014, 02:07 AM   #8
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Originally Posted by Doppleganger View Post
in spite of Kindle's appeal to the common, vulgar, weak, licentious smartphone crowd
So you're telling me that you're a fan of the Amazon Hellfire TV then.
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Old 08-26-2014, 11:38 AM   #9
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It's not my fault!
Mea culpa!
I'm not to blame!
Mea culpa!
It was the Kindle girl, the Amazon who set this flame!
Mea maxima culpa!
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