Regarding the Twitch controversy of the last few days, Polygon writes:

I was fucking furious when I first got word of Twitch’s plan to begin muting the audio of archived videos containing copyrighted music.

This move felt actively harmful to me, as someone who has spent over a year building my personal Twitch channel into something I care about strongly. I recognize the need to protect copyrights, and I’m as annoyed as anybody by streamers who play Spotify on top of the games they’re streaming.

The music industry, Chad noted, is notoriously “aggressive [in] enforcing its copyrights in lieu of what may be good business.” He’s careful to remind me that they also have the right to do this, even if it might seem short-sighted. And it’s almost certainly that aggressive-minded music industry that Twitch is trying to sidestep with this move.

Basically, while Twitch could’ve handled this way, way better, the blame mostly falls on the music industry, which continues to be run by giant dickbags who have absolutely no idea how the modern world works.

As much shit as we like to give cable companies and networks for being behind the times, the music industry still seems to largely live in the 1990’s. The more modernization democratizes the distribution of content – music included – the less relevant these pathetic middlemen become. The worst part is, these people apparently see it coming, and rather than adapt and find a way to actually be relevant in the changing world, they continue to desperately fight the inevitable using terrible, out-of-date copyright laws.