Twitch Has Become a Haven For Live Sports Piracy

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Twitch has been and remains home to illicit sports broadcasts; a late December boxing match attracted over 86,000 viewers -- some of whom spammed ASCII genitalia in chat -- and a mid-January soccer match drew over 70,000 over three livestreams. Although Twitch often stomps them out mid-match, plenty of livestreams posted by throwaway accounts with innocuous names like "Untitled" slip through the cracks and garner tens of thousands of viewers. As the value of sports media rights has climbed to over $20 billion, copyright holders have more incentive than ever to guard their treasure. Yet piracy persists, in part because it's so burdensome for copyright holders to catch it. Stream aggregation site FirstRow Sports lays out a buffet of illicit livestreams for games ranging from ice hockey to basketball and attracts over 300,000 daily visitors, according to data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb. In January 2019 alone, sports fans accessed sports piracy sites 362.7 million times, according to data from digital piracy research firm Muso. On Discord, anonymous benefactors distribute links to soccer livestreams like handfuls of pigeon feed at the park. Once a stream is taken down, another immediately manifests. It's like 40 games of Whac-A-Mole simultaneously taking place in 40 adjacent arcades. Increasingly, those links lead to Twitch, whose credentials as a mainstream platform make it a relatively safe option -- especially after Reddit shut down the popular soccer piracy subreddit r/soccerstreams. "The older days of streams (5+ years ago) was [sic] littered with ads and viruses," says a soccer stream Discord moderator who goes by Tom. "even though it is considered illegal, I see it being the same as watching porn and being under 18." He adds that some of the hairier-looking piracy sites are still more popular, offer higher-quality streams, and have live chats that utilize Twitch chats' code. Twitch's DMCA guidelines specify that copyright owners can submit takedown requests, and asks the people who submit them to add a "statement under penalty of perjury" that they're authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner. Occasionally, media companies file claims to Twitch impacting legitimate streamers who commentate over or react to games, television, or YouTube clips. Copyright holders can also choose to sue, as the third-largest internet company in Russia did against Twitch in December for broadcasting an English Premier League streams. It's a rare escalation, and one that underscores how serious an issue Twitch sports piracy has become. Twitch "only provides users access to the platform, does not post its own content, cannot change the content posted by users, or track possible violations of rights," says Twitch lawyer Yuliana Tabastayeva. The live streaming service said it will "continue to, as has always been the case, effectively and swiftly address any violation of its terms of service with the removal of unlicensed copyrighted content."

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