3 Count: Twitch Apologizes

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1: Senator Thom Tillis Seeks Suggestions for Reform of Digital Millenium Copyright Act

First off today, Jem Aswad at Variety reports that Senator Thom Tillis, fresh off a successful reelection campaign, has published an open letter to stakeholders calling for significant reforms to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The letter itself calls out 15 different areas where Senator Tillis feels that the DMCA can be improved and would represent a fundamental change to how the law works. The area likely to draw the most attention is his call to move to a notice-and-staydown system that would require hosts to ensure that copyright-infringing material reuploaded to their service. This is in stark contrast to the current notice-and-takedown system that requires rightsholders to repeatedly file new notices as infringing works are reuploaded by users.

The letter comes after a lengthy series of hearings in Congress about the need to reform the DMCA, which examined the entirety of the law. Senator Tillis is asking for feedback on the proposed reforms, encouraging interested parties to email members of his staff before December 1st.

2: 5,500 Pirate IPTV Servers Shut Down By 700 Police Officers Around Europe

Next up today, Andy Maxwell at Torrentfreak writes that law enforcement agencies across Europe have shuttered some 5,500 servers used to stream pirated content to the public. The operation involved some 700 officers across 11 countries and resulted in the arrest of an alleged boss of a pirate TV operation that is estimated to have earned some €10.7 million ($12.6 million) in profits.

The service made a wide variety of content available illegally including TV broadcasts, movies and even live sporting events. The raid on the network, entitled The Perfect Storm, took place on Friday and involved heavy coordination between members of law enforcement across Europe. All in all, some thirty search and seizure orders were executed, and 100 house searches were carried out.

Effects of the raids could be far-reaching as some 50 million users have been identified and it is suspected that other pirate services could be impacted by the various seizures that took place.

3: Twitch Apologizes to Streamers for its Mishandling of Music Copyright

Finally today, Bijan Stephen at The Verge reports that Twitch has published a new blog post to clarify some of its recent copyright-related actions and to apologize to impacted users.

Twitch has found itself at the center of repeated controversy after a slate of DMCA notices rocked the service causing it to remove a large number of clips and on-demand videos from the service. Though no copyright strikes were issued, the company made it so that the videos could not be restored, even if the creator felt they were not infringing or removed by mistake.

In their post, Twitch explained what many had expected: That they were not prepared for the onslaught of DMCA notices. They claimed that they received fewer than fifty music-related DMCA notifications each year. However, beginning in May, they started to receive huge batches of notifications, including thousands each week. They do not expect that pace to slow and are working on improving their copyright management system to keep up.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

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