Today marked the opening ceremonies for BlizzCon, the annual Blizzard Entertainment fan event Diablo, Starcraft, World Of Warcraft, Hearthstoneand more – get together to celebrate the company’s games, and see everything that will follow new stuff. And despite the fact that it was entirely online this year – or “BlizzConline”, as it went awkwardly, the event still had some major revelations today., including news that fan favorite Diablo II is remastered and relaunched at the end of this year. What BlizzCon 2021 wasn’t, though, it was hilarious – at least until Metallica took the “stage.”
In any other year, one of the biggest rock bands for dads in the world participating in the collective orcs of Blizzard fans would be just another moment of creating hype for BlizzCon participants. This year, however, the opening ceremonies were broadcast online, both through the official BlizzCon, YouTube and Twitch website. And you know what happens when licensed music is played on the internet, don’t you, folks? That’s right: copyright issues!
On Uproxx, the sound of James, Lars and the boys’ performance apparently came out as usual on YouTube and the BlizzCon page – although everything seems to have been cut from the YouTube upload of the event. But on Twitch … On Twitch, things didn’t go so well. Which means that even though it was hosted on the official twitchgaming channel, the performance was ominous. preceded by a chyron noting that “The next musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder”. And then this happened:
(You can see yourself Twitch broadcast the event; Metallica things start at about 1:10:00.)
And, look: we can prove that someone from Twitch intentional chosen the craziest, the most Zelda forest-bottom imaginable music for Metallica to hide their hearts, instead of extremely disseminating their copyrights the music (Ahe thus had to deal with the possibility of issuing one of their ubiquitous ones DMCA removal notifications for themselves)? Obviously not, just as we can’t show definitive evidence that Twitch then he switched to “lo-fi beats to beat them in public“To finish the set. It is entirely possible that this was the case just, you know, the copyrightless sound that Twitch have at one’s fingertips, which they then simply chose to double over one of the most popular rock bands of all time. On the other hand, we can prove that it’s extremely fun to watch this, especially – as many people have pointed out – since it’s Metallica at least in part responsible for the restrictive nature of the many laws of online music streaming that dominate the Internet today, according to their high profile campaign against Napster back at the dawn of MP3.