Twitch has no intention of using audio recognition on live streams

Following this week’s news from Twitch that it had partnered with Audible Magic to flag copyrighted music in its video on demand storage, the company has revealed that its content creators will be able to refute copyright claims with a soon-to-be implemented “appeals button”, and that they have no intention of using audio recognition on their live streams.

Twitch got a ton of feedback on the controversial feature this week as it begun to roll-out across the platform, with Audible Magic flagging everything in its path.  The new system, now infamously has flagged content in on demand video from the content creators and intellectual property holders themselves.  We’ve seen it in the case of Valve, Iron Galaxy, and other developers who claim to have very little control over the process.

“We’re deploying an “appeal” button for VODs that have been flagged for copyrighted music by the new Audio Recognition system.  We recognize that the system is not yet perfect,” reads a post from Matthew DiPietro.  We want to make this system as fair and unobtrusive as possible.”

With so much feedback coming in, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear took to a Reddit Ask Me Anything to talk about the new copyright protection, and the company’s plans going forward.  It appears that, at least for now, Twitch has no plans on trying to bring the audio recognition tools to live streams.  Shear says, “We have no intention whatsoever of bringing audio-recognition to live streams on Twitch.  This is a VOD-only change for Twitch.”

While Twitch itself will be looking to iron out the features in the weeks ahead, users of the streaming site shouldn’t expect too much backtracking of the program.  That is, not if copyright laws don’t change drastically, and soon. The company’s actions are likely a direct result of the need to protect itself from being sued by intellectual property holders, a similar course of action that another high profile VOD service, YouTube, took back in 2013.