Just three days after Ludwig Ahgren left his massive Twitch following for YouTube, he was hit with what he thought was a suspension from the platform. According to a report from Kotaku, Ahgren was playing other YouTube videos during his stream, when he landed on the infamously catchy Baby Shark song. His stream was shut down shortly thereafter, giving his viewers — and himself — the impression that he was banned for violating YouTube’s copyright policies.
However, Ahgren wasn’t actually struck with a copyright strike or a suspension. “Ludwig wasn’t suspended,” Lauren Verrusio, the head of creator and consumer communications at YouTube told The Verge. “Our Content ID tool picked up his playing of an unlicensed video while he was going live to fans.”
The whole incident was just a case of confusion. “If Ludwig were to have just stopped playing the copyrighted material, he could have continued the livestream just fine,” Verrusio explained. “But he wasn’t sure of what he was seeing on the backend and thought it was a suspension.”
Ludwig addressed the incident in a video on his secondary channel, in which he interprets the warning as a ban. “I’m pretty sure the corporate overlords who own Baby Shark have, like, an iron fist on YouTube, and so they took me down.” Verrusio notes that YouTube is in touch with Ahgren to explain the platform’s copyright rules, and that Ludwig plans on going live again today.
DMCA, or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, has caused issues across all video sharing and livestreaming platforms, with creators getting videos unknowingly taken down and demonetized for having copyrighted material. Earlier this year, Twitch rolled out a tool that makes it easier to delete old videos that contain copyrighted music, and later issued a wave of copyright strikes in response to DMCA complaints. Like Twitch, YouTube also operates with a three-strike policy — accrue three copyright violations and you’re permanently banned. To help soften DMCA’s blow, YouTube started telling creators if their content contains copyrighted material before their videos are posted.
As Ludwig gets acquainted with his new streaming hub, his mistakes are likely to go unnoticed. He currently has 2.19 million subscribers on YouTube, with more bound to trickle in from what’s left of his fanbase on Twitch.
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