[phone_book]

This is light on details. Blizzard had their own channel up and was playing the music. This clip is from Twitch's channel. Lots of streamers were restreaming the event and right before this performance, there was a message that said, "The upcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder." I imagine only Blizzard themselves had the rights to stream it. You can watch it on Blizzard's channel https://www.twitch.tv/videos/920697882?t=1h24m52s

[henrikschroder]

> and right before this performance, there was a message that said

I understand the legality of it, but this is absurd!

Anyone, anywhere, could watch the original livestream and hear the music.

Or, you could watch it on Twitch, and get commentary on the whole thing by your chosen favourite twitcher, in addition to watching it yourself. But then, for legal reasons, the music was replaced.

You could imagine a technical solution where Twitch just streams the twitcher against a transparent background, and you have to stitch it together yourself with the official stream, resulting in exactly the same experience as if Twitch did that stream stitching directly. That would be ok for legal reasons, even though it's completely identical to the not ok for legal reasons version above. How does that make sense?

Why does it matter, to Metallica, where the streams are stitched together? Why does it matter, to them, that everyone watches the completely free stream of their music from a specific source, and not any other source?

The value to Metallica is that they're getting paid by Blizzard. The value to Blizzard is that it drives attention to Blizzcon. Why does either of those entities care how exactly people are viewing Blizzcon? What matters is that people are watching it, and the how is secondary. But because of copyright laws, the how matters, and we get this absurd state.

[jcpham2]

Is the internet’s memory really this short on this band’s historical stance on copyright, RIAA, Napster, and so forth?

They’ve always been like public enemy number 1 of music pirates...

[henrikschroder]

I remember, but it's one thing to try to protect copyrighted material that you're selling, i.e. pirating vs selling CDs. But this thing where they're trying to protect exactly how you're receiving a free stream of their music makes no sense at all. The concert was already free to watch, so why does anyone care?

[jcpham2]

I’m not sure why people care. I’m not sure why people record, document, bootleg live performances. I have no idea how music works for profit anymore. I’m just sort of calling attention to the historical hatred of this one particular band, even if no one understands it anymore; but it is a thing that exists. I’ve witnessed it.

I think it might be at the heart of the significance of this conversation.

(and I’m only talking about _audio_ recording, I’m not even touching the copyright issues from audio + video)

[dwild]

> Why does it matter, to Metallica, where the streams are stitched together? Why does it matter, to them, that everyone watches the completely free stream of their music from a specific source, and not any other source?

A likely explanation is that they charge Blizzard based on the amount of viewers that was there.

There could also be some kind of agreement that they had control over the redistribution afterward, in case they would prefer to take it down. Once redistributed by someone external, that's no longer possible.