Category: Fails

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So if you didn’t catch wind of this yet, Twitch’s general counsel put up a blog post today showcasing their new partnership with Audible Magic, which is apparently a content scanning service that is designed to enrich content creators dinosaur publishers when their copyrighted content is found used in online media.

Let’s take a look:

Starting today, Twitch will be implementing technology intended to help broadcasters avoid the storage of videos containing unauthorized third-party audio.

You didn’t ask for anyone to help you with this, but we don’t care.

We respect the rights of copyright owners, and are voluntarily undertaking this effort to help protect both our broadcasters and copyright owners.

We suddenly care about copyrighted material being used on our site, but for some reason don’t care about the DMCA—which is designed to deal with this kind of thing—so we’re doing this other thing instead. Check this out; you’re going to love it.

We’ve partnered with Audible Magic, which works closely with the recorded music industry, to scan past and future VODs for music owned or controlled by clients of Audible Magic. This includes in-game and ambient music. When music in the Audible Magic database is detected (“Flagged Content”), the affected portion of the VOD will be muted and volume controls for that VOD will be turned off. Additionally, past broadcasts and highlights with Flagged Content are exportable but will remain muted.

We’ve muted probably half of all archived videos on Twitch, because we’re scanning for music that is used in the very games we want you to stream.

No; we don’t see the irony in this. Maybe you should mute the games you are playing and just talk when you do a show; it would really help us out. Thanks.

You can even make laser gun sounds when you play. Your viewers might find that interesting.

The Audible Magic technology will scan for third party music in 30 minute blocks — if Audible Magic does not detect its clients’ music, that portion of the VOD will not be muted. If third party audio is detected anywhere in the 30-minute scanned block, the entire 30 minutes will be muted.

Why use a scalpel when you can use a sledgehammer?

Seriously, you should be wowed by what we are doing here. We took the concepts behind YouTube’s ContentID—a system pretty much everyone hates with a passion—and found a way to make it even shittier by making sure that instead of monetizing your content for other people, we’re just making it useless instead.

Audio Recognition will only be run against audio in VODs. We are not scanning live broadcasts and there is no automated takedown of live content.

Yet.

Flagged Content will display an on-screen notification informing viewers that content owned or controlled by a third party has been identified. The progress bar will also be red for the duration of the muted section.

We’d like to make it painfully obvious how many videos have been affected by this change and how screwed you are at the same time. We hope you like this new feature.

Please note that Audio Recognition is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate.  It may return false positives or miss content from copyright owners who do not work with Audible Magic.  If you wish to include music in your VODs, please remember that you are responsible for clearing all such rights (this includes ambient music that may be playing in the background while you are broadcasting).  If you would like to include free-to-use music in your VODs, there are a variety of resources available to you, including:

Automated content scanning and action has worked really well in the past, right? I mean, it’s surely not going to end up causing things like this, or this, or even such ridiculousness as this.

Nope; automated scanning has always been the chickenshit way out of defending users’ rights, so we’re taking it because it never goes wrong.

If you believe that your video has been flagged improperly and that you have cleared the rights to all of the sound recordings in your uploaded video, then we will consider unmuting your video if you send us a counter-notification that is compliant with the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”).

We are going to make you file a legal statement to defend your content even though the appropriate legal statement to take down your content that would normally cause you to file a counter-notice was never filed in the first place.

We’re either so understaffed that we can’t process the barrage of DMCA notices we get in, we are (as above) refusing to defend the rights of our users (and by extension our own rights), or both.

Oh: we’re not really going to tell you what to do in these cases. Instead, we’ll pretend you know about the law that we’re not forcing copyright holders to adhere to.

Any copyright owner that believes that any of their content is used in any live broadcasts or VOD without authorization should submit a notification of claimed infringement to Twitch pursuant to our Terms of Service. If you are the legal owner of copyrighted music that you would like to protect via Audible Magic’s technology, visit AudibleMagic.com.

If you own the music that is used in a game and have problems with it being showcased on a streaming service that is supposed to be for games, and would like us to mute that content so that people can’t hear the game others are saying is pretty awesome and which might cause other people to buy the game in question and thus earn you more money, please, by all means, let us or our new partner know.

Twitch has partnered with Audible Magic without waiving any rights or defenses available to it under law. Twitch is not obligated to filter content stored on  the Twitch platform by its users and assumes no liability for the actions of its users notwithstanding the implementation of the Audible Magic technology. Twitch reserves the right to stop filtering audio content in VODs in its sole discretion at any time and without liability to any third party, subject only to any contractual obligations.

Legally, we didn’t actually have to do this, but we’re doing it anyway.

No; we aren’t going to tell you why.

We want to hear your feedback and questions. Tune in to the following events to ask us (almost!) anything:

  • Reddit AMA on /r/Twitch: Thursday, August 7, 10:30am PST

  • Twitch Weekly: Friday, August 8 at 2pm PST

We really hate the person who signed us up for an AMA the day after we made this change. And we’ll probably ignore anything that isn’t “how awesome is this new feature?”

And, as always, please feel free to leave your comments below. We will answer as best we can.

We are high as a kite.

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No, not mine. Don’t worry.

Salon:

After our house burned down in Wisconsin a few months ago, my husband and I packed our four young kids and all our belongings into a gold minivan and drove to my sister-in-law’s place, just outside of Atlanta. On the back windshield, we pasted six stick figures: a dad, a mom, three young girls, and one baby boy.

That minivan was sitting in the front driveway of my sister-in-law’s place the night a SWAT team broke in, looking for a small amount of drugs they thought my husband’s nephew had. Some of my kids’ toys were in the front yard, but the officers claimed they had no way of knowing children might be present. Our whole family was sleeping in the same room, one bed for us, one for the girls, and a crib.

After the SWAT team broke down the door, they threw a flashbang grenade inside. It landed in my son’s crib.

Legalize and regulate all the drugs. All of them. The alternative we are doing in this country now is just not worth it. And it’s not right.

Police don’t need flashbang grenades and assault rifles.

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Ultra Street Fighter IV came out this week and I’ve been playing a fair bit. (If you’d like to see an example of how bad I am, feel free to play the below video and skip around a bit.)

I’m subscribed to updates from the only place that hosts fighting game stuff here in the St. Louis area (it seems to be a small crowd). This week, I was informed that they are going to have a tournament for the release of Ultra this upcoming Monday night:

Screen Shot 2014-06-06 at 8.33.02 PM

Now, why would I not want to attend such an event? It has a game I like, competition that I don’t normally get to experience, and could be a fun time. I could learn something about how to play the game.

Screen Shot 2014-06-06 at 8.33.14 PM

Oh, there it is. That’s why I wouldn’t want to attend.

Thanks for reminding me, St. Louis fighting game community. You’re the best.

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TechCrunch seems to know what’s up with whatever Amazon is supposed to be making to enter the games market:

Amazon is readying a game console/set top box of its own, and we’ve learned from multiple sources familiar with the device that the Lab126-produced gadget will have a form factor similar to the Chromecast, or in other words it’ll be a stick or dongle as opposed to something like the Apple TV. In addition, one source claims it should have support for streaming full PC game titles, and as such might be able to compete with consoles including the Xbox and PlayStation, instead of just Android-powered living room game devices.

This thing keeps getting weirder and weirder. (And worse and worse.) First it’s an Ouya-like thing, which was a recipe for failure. Now it’s a Chromecast-style HDMI dongle that streams games to your TV like OnLive:

These streaming efforts will be more akin to the remote game service offered by OnLive, than to the local streaming that Nvidia offers through its Shield Android gaming console and Nvidia-powered gaming PCs. The titles, which are said to be top-tier games, will be streamed from Amazon’s services at 30fps (which is comparable to most online video) according to our source.

Um… OK. So that’s 30fps, plus (on a great internet connection) at least 50ms of latency for controller input, assuming a very generous 25ms ping to the server, and then the data has to travel there and back.

Is there actually a market for this? I’ll give the streaming thing a try if PlayStation Now ends up being something that Plus members get for free, but at least for me, I’m not interested in anything where I’m not running things locally. Input lag would drive me nuts.

Amazon should stick to the business it knows and does best: selling you things that it then ships to your door.

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Ron Amadeo for Ars Technica:

The agreement places a company-wide ban on Android forks, saying OEMs are forbidden from taking “any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android” and specifically disallows distributing or encouraging a third party to distribute “a software development kit derived from Android.” Google has full control over the countries its apps are released in and distribution methods used to distribute the apps. This allows Google to restrict its apps to the Play Store and will keep them out of competing stores like Amazon and Samsung. Google also stipulates that the Google apps must be distributed free of charge, and they cannot be modified, reverse engineered, or used to make a derivative work, and ads are not allowed to be placed in, on, or around Google’s apps.

But Android is “open.”

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I’m not sure what the worst part of this gif is:

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Is it the forced laughter? The forced diversity of the actors involved? The fact that they are supposed to be socializing around food that no one is eating? The product placement itself?

Then again, hey—I’m a stereotypically overweight gamer, so maybe the worst part that this is probably aimed directly at me.

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Avinash Kaushik:

Adobe was hacked recently and of course someone smart is going to analyze the data to find insights. My favourite one was the top 20 passwords used by Adobe users.

38 million records were lost by Adobe, though the original number was said to be 2.9 million. 1.9 million people used 123456 as their password!

Here’s the image he included with his post:

36

Yes, people are stupid and these are ludicrously bad passwords. Shame on them.

But shame on Adobe for allowing users to set these kinds of passwords in the first place. Regardless of the hack, these are easily guessed passwords and could have led to account compromises without too much work.

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“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

–Samuel Beckett

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Go back and watch the original Robocop; I did recently. It’s not really notable as an action movie. It’s crazily satirical and accusatory of the overindulgent and corporatized 80s. That’s why it works and that’s why it’s great. (If you’ve never seen it, I recommend it. Plus, it’s oddly prophetic regarding Detroit.)

This just looks like yet another boring action movie retread. I hope I’m wrong and it actually has some soul. But given that it has four screenwriters credited, I’m not crossing my fingers.