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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 9020016" data-attributes="member: 6669048">This is highly unlikely to happen because it would open the pandora's box that the entire industry wants to ignore:There is no legal precedent for the legality of live-streaming games.No company - not even Nintendo with all the crap it pulls or Atlus who threatened streamers with legal action over Persona 5 and other games - has gone beyond filing copyright claims and DMCA takedowns to YouTube and other hosting services to take advantage of the automated systems. No lawsuits have ever made it to trial (the closest was when Digital Homicide went after Jim Stephanie Sterling), so there is no legal precedent for whether or not "Playing a video game with (or without) commentary" is covered as a derivative work and/or review/commentary under fair use.Every video game studio knows this, and every video game studio avoids going to court over it for three big reasons.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Streaming and Let's Play videos are free marketing. Even videos that are highly critical of a game drive sales. Even for big-name AAA titles everyone knows, streams and videos still drive sales.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Nobody wants the bad press of being known as the studio that killed streaming. Even the largest studio with the best PR firm would get crushed by the backlash against the ripple effects of going to court over streaming. Do you want to be named as the reason that people like Ninja or AuronPlay stop streaming?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">They don't want a court precedent set because it's a very effective legal threat they could very easily lose as there are multiple avenues of defense against it. And once there is a legal precedent set that streaming a game is legal, they lose a big weapon in their arsenal to act as a threat. It's mutually assured destruction.</li> </ol>Not to mention that Twitch (Amazon) and YouTube (Google) make a lot of money off the back of streamers and let's players that they do not want to lose. Any game studio attempting to challenge the legality of streaming games will end up going directly against those two in a legal fight.They could always try this. Anytime they wanted to. Opening a streaming network doesn't affect this one way or the other. They haven't because either they don't want to or they know they would lose on any appeal because it's straight-up protected fair use. Like there are legal precedents about this where companies tried to use unauthorized use of art to claim copyright infringement to silence critics and went to court over it. And lost.</blockquote>

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