Fascinating moves by the company. They gain users by looking the other way for illegal sports broadcasts which made up the majority of watched content at Justin.tv. Next they pivot to e-sports with Twitch which is a huge success but also plagued by rampant copyright issues (this is the music, but the actual broadcast of some games may be illegal). They look the other way again until they decide to cash out, which means a quick clean up before the billion dollar pay day.
The lesson to VC backed startups here should be to ignore the laws you don't want to bother with until the last possible second (and then some more!), preferably with offer paperwork in your hands. Airbnb has shown that this can scale.
Oh and I forgot to add, the best part is that Twitch is now cleaning up for a pay day from the mother of all law ignoring startups--YouTube. The circle of startups.
Did they actually ignore DMCA requests or violate copyright themselves in any way? Or are you just upset they didn't implement an automated takedown system until now?
They testified to Congress that they were doing their best to fight piracy while at the same time all of the top feeds on Justin.tv were pirated. It was a joke. DMCA requests were not meant to combat live programming--get one down and another pops up. In three hours the point is moot.
The lesson to VC backed startups here should be to ignore the laws you don't want to bother with until the last possible second (and then some more!), preferably with offer paperwork in your hands. Airbnb has shown that this can scale.