While fans of Metallica enjoyed a special performance by the band at the end of the opening ceremony of the BlizzCon 2021 (Named BlizzConline for being 100% virtual), those who saw it on the official Twitch Gaming channel were able to enjoy the concert with the most non-heavy metal music imaginable to avoid copyright infringement.
Shortly after Metallica started playing, Twitch switched to royalty-free music to avoid a DMCA infringement, which unsurprisingly led to a few hilarious moments that were captured by people like @Slasher and Twitter.
the current state of Twitch: the official Twitch Gaming channel cut off the live Metallica concert to play 8bit folk music to avoid DMCA pic.twitter.com/sCn56So8Ee
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) February 19, 2021
It appears that even Twitch itself did not obtain adequate rights to allow the music to be played on its own channel. Fortunately, the concert and its music played as expected on other Twitch channels such as Blizzard and the official BlizzCon live stream on YouTube.
DMCA (Digital Age Copyright Act) takedowns have been a huge problem for Twitch streamers recently, and Twitch even admitted that it has handled this poorly and promised that better tools are on the way.
In addition to this fun moment, BlizzCon 2021 has already provided great news and reveals, such as Diablo 2 Resurrected, the Harpy class from Diablo 4, 55 new Overwatch 2 details, and much more.
At the time of this writing, BlizzCon Day 2 is underway and you can catch up on the best announcements in our BlizzCon 2021 recap.
