The terms of service is a contract. Suing someone who breaks a contract is what civil courts handle all day long.
In this case, Twitch claims to have damages from the breaches.
> As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ material breaches of the Terms and Developer Terms, Twitch has been and will continue to be harmed, thereby entitling it to injunctive relief, compensatory damages, attorneys’ fees, costs, and/or other equitable relief against Defendants. Twitch is entitled to special damages in the amount of lost profits and other reasonably foreseeable harms proximately caused by Defendants’ breach.
Are you suggesting that Twitch should ignore accounts that violate the ToS, so long as it was a computer that violated the terms as opposed to a person?
Major broadcasters (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX) have been trying to sue streamers like Locast civilly for years now. So far, they’ve been unsuccessful. But going from the threat of monetary damages to 10 years in jail will allow them to get others to back down even if they’re wrong.
It would be a huge pain. It's easier to do a DMCA notice & takedown process than to subpoena Twitch for the identity of the streamers and then sue them in court.
I have to ask... What was the reason you shut this person down? Was it simply that they were violating your rate limit, or something more?
E.g. if they were paying for the 1000 concurrent puppeteer sessions, would everything be in the clear with your SaaS?
Presumably, your service doesn't care what the users use it for. Sure, though, it's a violation of twitch's terms of service to fake viewers on the platform. I may be naive -- could twitch sue a service that is used to fake viewers?
I'm pretty sure every single game streamed cost more than $2500 to produce (some over $100M), and that streamers are doing it for financial gain, often putting themselves in the highest tax brackets.
More importantly, the law is the law, and it's bad business to detract from that fact.
Twitch isn't any different than the screenshot case... it took art to load the DOSBox programs... sending the right input signals to the various programs to allow the screenshot to be taken.
This is driven by overly cautious attorneys. Twitch has obviously been attacked by some rights holders so they over compensate in an effort to protect themselves from future legal challenges.
They’d want to keep things anonymous even if they know the identities of the streamers, which they can probably guess from emails and IP logs. If they name names the narrative changes to “website owned by worlds biggest company trying to put 15 year olds in jail for having fun”.
Honest question, doesn't the Twitch TOS have an arbitration agreement?
In my (nonlawyer) reading of their terms, it's not clear to me why this wouldn't fall under that policy. It doesn't seem to fit into any of the exceptions they list. How can Twitch file this suite before a normal judge?
Edit: Hah, another commenter found the filing, and it alleges a trademark violation. I wonder if that's in there purely so they can get this before a normal judge?
I mean this is pretty much business risk analysis. Other things that would shut down most streamers:
- Their ISP simply refusing to do business with them.
- Twitch banning them.
- YouTube banning them.
- PayPal banning them.
- Their ISP changing their terms of service to classify professional streaming as business activity and not allowed on their network without a business plan.
- Their city deciding that since your building is zoned for residential only that they have to stream somewhere else.
- The publishers of the games they play submitting DMCA takedowns on their content.
This in no way justifies malicious actions by ISPs but the argument "you can't throttle people's internet, their livelihoods might depend on it" would in practice be met by "well those people shouldn't try to run a business on a consumer internet plan without accepting the risks."
I can only speculate. Trying to get publicity? Wanting to comply with the court order without censoring individual streamers? Just moving away from a problem? No idea.
Yes, many streamers on Twitch, and content creators on YouTube have faced such accusations, some of them have been extensively harassed, to the point they even provided evince, medication signed by doctors out of desperation for the harassment to stop, needless to say in some cases it didn't.
I’m sure there are other things - eg punitive damages exist for the purpose of ensuring that the cost of violation is more than just the direct harn
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