CSGO Twitch Streamers Banned for Restreaming Berlin Major
Tags: Starladder, Twitch, Gaming, Counter Strike, Valve

There has a been a large ripple in the Twitch community recently, more specifically streamers that are big into streaming the streaming magnet Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. In late August this year, there was an influx of bans that were issued to some big CS:GO Twitch streamers. Some of these Twitch streamers include fl0m, nookkyy and gabepeixe just to name a few with each of the three listed having over 100 thousand followers on Twitch. Each of these streamers all received their bans as they were doing live streams commenting over the events of the Major, as a result of DMCA strikes being filed by Star Ladder.

Star Ladder have it written in their “official rulebook and regulations” that they hold all broadcasting rights of the events, however, these rules don’t seemingly address the legalities surrounding any fair use implementation as these videos the Twitch streamers were using on their streams were obtained in-game which is property technically owned by Valve. And that’s not even covering the fact that commentary of an event and the transformative nature can effectively change the whole event purpose entirely to which these Twitch streamers were making their own content off of the event.

It is, of course, dangerous at times when things like this happen as for many Twitch streamers, streaming on Twitch is a job for them due to the amount of revenue and in case you were wondering, yes the streamers weren’t too happy to find out about the news however according to nookkyy Twitch didn’t notify the streamers about the account termination or give any reason at the start. I’m not saying that these DMCAs are Twitch’s fault as they are legally obligated to step in when these takedowns are filed, but all I’m saying is Twitch probably could have done with alerting their creators immediately when their channels got banned.

What was especially interesting to see, as a result of many of these majors being broadcast over Steam’s broadcasting service through Steam, was a response that a Steam support representative gave to Twitch streamer and Esports commentator Weefreeman when he questioned Steam on the policies regarding streaming in-game broadcasts onto Twitch channels.

“ You’re free to cast over games that are taking place whether they’re at majors or not. Any content that is being broadcast through GOTV can be re-broadcast or commented over if you’d like.”

Many users saw parallels between this and a similar situation that occurred with DotaTV and Dota 2 back in January 2018 and what’s even more interesting is the statement Valve sent out at the time regarding other companies filing DMCAs to footage of Valve games being used on live streams.

“ The first issue we’ve been seeing discussed is regarding DMCA notices. This one is very simple: No one besides Valve is allowed to send DMCA notices for games streamed off of DotaTV that aren’t using the broadcasters’ unique content (camera movements, voice, etc).”

1 day after these bans were issued, StarLadder went to Twitter to state that they had reached “sponsorship agreements” with both fl0m and another streamer by the name of metabro. They also link to their website where they continuously list the streamers that have their permission to do any casting of the event.