[Editor Charlie sez:  It’s about time that these royalty deadbeats began understanding the meaning of “repeat infringer policy” which Twitch does not seem to have in place at all.]

If you’ve watched any Twitch streams at all in your life ever, this might come as a surprise to you. After all, pretty much everybody on Twitch uses music. Sometimes it’s royalty-free, but it’s not uncommon to hear familiar hits during big streamers’ shows. Some streamers have playlists going in the background for the entirety of multi-hour streams. Others—Kotaku’s own channel included—put on some chill music before a stream is about to start, to let viewers know it’s time to tune in. To account for this, sometimes Twitch auto-mutes audio in portions of stream archives. Otherwise, people don’t usually get in trouble for it.

That doesn’t mean they can’t get in trouble for it, though. Twitch’s rules state that any content owned by somebody else is fair game for DMCA takedown if the owner decides to claim it. This applies to songs, as well as video clips and things of that nature—and even games like Persona 5, though publisher Atlus ultimately walked back its restrictions in that case.

Twitch keeps getting bigger and bigger, so it seems only natural that, at some point, big record labels and music companies would start cracking down.

Read the post on Kotaku