Gumpyyy wrote:
What are people expecting just because it's part of the game does not mean it bypasses copyright in any way.
Ikr.
ESA twitch VOD's were muted. Legitimate versions of the games were played, but the background music was licensed.
You, personally, can play the game and listen to the music, and so can other people watching you play the game. But the moment that gets saved to a VOD, it can be downloaded and the music exists as a copy, separate from the game (who cares if you're watching a recording of the game, it's not the game). That's the copyright infringement, the digital medium itself.
If you want to play music to the public, you have to pay royalties, a system for managing copyright content distribution. In the case of a game with licensed music, the royalties are paid to the respective copyright-holders by the game developer/publisher, and should only be bundled with a legitimate version of the game, not as a digital medium for free download (it's part of the game and should be bought with it).
In the case of osu!, you're fucked. osu! indemnifies itself against uploads, and instead refers the target offender as the uploader (German mappers anyone?). You then download it (again, your fault), and now you're streaming copyrighted music, to be copied by people downloading subsequent VOD's, bypassing copyright and royalty (their fault and your fault).
You need to start running... I hear bullets.
I joke. As I said previously, they have the power, but don't have the ability to crack down on all of this stuff, since it takes resources (money). And even when they do, 90% of the time they don't even get their money, because they target poor people who don't have any, like you guys... considering the stupid amounts they ask for per offense. DMCA takedowns are all they can do effectively.
But this is just to give you an idea of how serious this actually is. People shrug it off these days and think it's not all that bad, saying "you're giving these guys extra coverage to people who would never know about or pay for this stuff." But really... it is that bad. They just choose not to come after you... Game of Thrones, for example.