Cult gaming site Twitch is tweaking the new copyright protection policy that it announced earlier this week, after revealing that it will remove the maximum length for highlight footage. The company has also introduced an appeal button for videos that are flagged as breaching copyright by its new Audio Recognition system — both changes are based on user feedback, it says.
Yesterday’s announcement of measures to clean up the site’s video-on-demand content by detecting audio that breaches copyright drew a negative reaction from many Twitch users. Most were concerned by the lack of warning and legal-heavy wording of the policy, which threatens to affect a large chunk of user-generated content on the site. The reaction was such that CEO Emmett Shear scheduled a Reddit AMA, in which he admitted that the company could have handled the situation better.
In today’s post, Twitch thanked its community for the feedback, and explained that it takes their opinions “very seriously”. The company says we can expect to see “more changes, more clarity, and more improvements” in the coming period in line with responses from users.
Twitch has been strongly linked with an acquisition from Google. The effort to clamp down on copyright-violating content and this week’s closure of its Justin.tv site suggests that a deal is imminent. However — as we pointed out yesterday — the company needs to tread carefully when making changes if it wants to retain its community, which is central to its success.
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Headline image via camknows / Flickr
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