The streaming platform Twitch recently flagged a police siren sound effect in the game Project Zomboid as copyright infringement. As a result, the broadcast of a popular Spanish streamer was muted. The developers believe that a copyright troll is at work and are currently trying to find a solution to the problem.
This week, a group of popular Spanish-speaking streamers hosted an event on Twitch themed around the Project Zomboid game. That would have been a pretty big deal for the indie game if the event hadn’t been ruined by an apparently false copyright claim. Project Zomboid’s developers, The Indie Stone, were quick to respond to the alleged copyright violations, but seem to have little support from the streaming platform.
Alleged copyright infringement by police siren
The streamer Menos Trece, who has over a million subscribers on Twitch and over two million on YouTube, first drew attention to the problem. After streaming at the Project Zomboid event, he was informed by Twitch that he had used infringing audio signals. However, this was not copyrighted music, but a police or ambulance siren that could be heard in the game.
The sound was claimed by the company “Dr. Sound Effects”, which allegedly owns the rights to the police siren. Twitch then muted parts of Menos Trece’s stream. Project Zomboid developers, The Indie Stone, were quick to tweet about the issue, suggesting “copyright trolls” could be behind it. The developers asked Twitch to work on the problem, instead the platform advised affected users to contest the copyright infringement.
The Indie Stone is currently considering changing the siren sound effects so that they are no longer identified as copyright infringement. Until then, they advise streamers to avoid police and ambulances. “Twitch’s copyright trolls have struck again and claimed ambulance sounds in-game. We’re working on a streamer mode that turns sirens into unconvincing synth sirens to prevent this from happening. or ambulance sirens until we add streamer mode,” the developers said.
Source: TorrentFreak
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