An open letter to the CoHmmunity about rebroadcasting

Is this when Devlish broadcast Kreatir's event without asking and Kreatir quit the community and left the scene?

yeah that lovely guy casting to his friends and 40 viewers

yeah that lovely guy casting to his friends and 40 viewers

I love how salty you still are
I must have made a huge impact on you .

yeah that lovely guy casting to his friends and 40 viewers

Indeed. FYI, last post july 2017... interesting that he should choose this day to come post again.

Sociopathy at its finest.

i resigned my posts and myself from this subject any further.

Hope in the end all can somehow at some point be friends again and all grow! \m/

- "You claim to be my friend and here you are trying to restrict me to what I can and can't do." If you were a real friend you would see the work that your friends do and you would respect it. By for example not streaming games, or even not streaming at all.

This would be great for all instances of this, but is genuinely un-doable. I feel like people shouldn't stream COH 2 when a tourney is taking place, and rather host the official broadcasting channel OR stream a different game. Once again totally unlikely, but in an ideal world where there were no egos, no grudges, ect; this is unlikely to happen till we all become better.

Having multiple streams up of one tourney, all it does is segment the community further and take away from the experience of the tourney, where everyone in the community together can experience all the hard work and dedication that everyone brings, even if it is just taking the time to view it.

I think everyone in this can do better. Including myself, immensely so.

how come we can't pull on the same string and make something even greater out of this ? :< this is becoming sad.

how come we can't pull on the same string and make something even greater out of this ? :< this is becoming sad.

Because fanboism and zealous dedication know no bounds, regardless if its your only faction or your stream or your community of the game you apparently enjoy, but do everything you can to ruin.

There is way too much mememe in this thread and coh2 community itself is an aggressive tumor at this point.

Streaming the Tournament


We would appreciate it if you do not stream our tournament, so that we can attract as many viewers for the official stream as possible. Consider it a donation to the tournament.

^ This is was written on the UTT tournament page originally by a close friend of James. Someone who was a 3 year sub to Hans... You can do your own morales on that and if you believe Hans made a valuable contribution to the the community then fine.


Also how is it not wrong? It's the same concept as going to a boxing match and livestreaming the event to Twitch. It's not your content. It is factual unauthorised broadcasting. You don't need to make your own moral judgements about this. It is written on the Twitch terms of conduct so that you don't have to guess what is right and what is wrong. Hans didn't even bother to observe the game he actually opened AE's stream to cast from it.

For someone who's entire income is based around Twitch I would have thought stepping into this territory might be considered risky. It might be worth reading those guidelines.

With regards to donations, streamers make money from advertising revenue, subs and donations. All things that could have been denied. Tournament Organisers have a right to schedule and run their own event. I'm fully aware we can't stop people broadcasting it. But it's written in the rules and it's about a level of human decency which is what this post is about.

Any of you could be streaming this event. But most people and players don't because they have the concensus on what is morally right and wrong to do. Stream 1v1 or another game. Don't s*** all over your friends and people who put on tournaments for you to play in.

You should have mentioned in the OP that there was a statement prohibiting rebroadcasts prior to the event as that gives you more authority since there wasn't ambiguity.

As for the boxing match analogy and rebroadcasting in general, I clearly stated the content creator usually is able to successfully DMCA rebroadcasts but if there was initial ambiguity, it is considered poor taste to jump straight to reporting people rather than telling the streamer to stop rebroadcasting. In a post about manners and etiquette, I felt it was important to point this out (Again I was unaware that there was a statement regarding rebroadcasting). Hans is a long standing member of the community and, to the best of my knowledge, your friend so handling this misunderstanding in private or a more magnanimous public post would be better than dog pilling on hans.

As I said in my original post, I would side more with the organizers but I objected to the OP's harshness towards Hans. It is the first time Hans rebroadcasted anyone's stream and he did stop rebroadcasting (which was left out of the OP) and he casted using the in-game spectate feature, which is 100% ok (which was also left out of the OP). In Han's defense, I doubted the severity of the damage he caused while showing how Hans potentially helped the official stream. I think a longstanding positive member of the community should be given more leeway on a potential first infraction.

As for the morality around casting games through the client, I mainly talked about the legality of it. Sure, you can say it is a crappy thing to do when the official stream is going on but it can be argued having more casts of the tourny games improves hype and will lead people to the official stream. As i pointed out before, Hans is a full time variety streamer so a good portion of viewers may not know about the tourny.

Ultimately, I don't necessarily disagree with anything you said but in how harsh you said it and how far the accusations went. You didn't just say Hans was being a dick for restreaming but stealing viewers, donations, and breaking TOS, implying he could be banned and you might do it. I just thought Hans deserves a bit more leniency than that for a first time offense done without malicious intent.

As for people shitting on each other, can the mods deal with the blatant toxic trolls insulting me instead of engaging in meaningful and civil discourse

how come we can't pull on the same string and make something even greater out of this ? :< this is becoming sad.

This is a good discussion to have. I wouldn't say that nothing good is going to come out of this because we as organisers are speaking out about how we feel about this. The most important thing is that instead of this 'unspoken code of conduct' we have opened a debate so everyone can have their say about it.

Following all the points here. Rules will be updated, guidelines will be established and sanctions created to ensure that situations like this are clear cut when someone breaks the rules.

Tournament organisers, casters and players have had a great and functional relationship for years without actually establishing any written guidelines. If we can't all agree on what is morally right or wrong, then we now have to make that clear to people.

There will still be people who break rules and try to shun the work we are doing in the community. But at least when that happens, we can unite against it

Sorry that I haven't posted anything yet but I had terrible pains yesterday and writing is exhausting for me.

Well what should I say: Stormless and A_E basicly summorized what was our intention with the Open-Letter: What happenend on Sunday should never happen again and I think that was my first thought. As a TO you have the FULL responsibility what happens. People are critizing you at first if anything goes wrong and as A_E mentionend its not always a pleasant job. With all that one of the "priviledge" as a TO is that you decide things. That starts with the name of the Tournament, Format etc. And aswell who casts the games. When I decided to organize this Tournament Me and my 2nd Admin FAHU we both agreed that Stormless, A_E and Romeo are the Best Caster for this Tournament. I thank all 3 of you for your hard work! and everybody else of course

I'm sorry Hans that youz think that our intention was to make a Witch Hunt against you. I say this now loud and clear: IT WAS NOT OUR INTENTION! What you did last Sunday was wrong! You had not the right to cast any of the games on Sunday without asking me! If you see this otherwise then go for a sec into yourself imagine me sitting infront of you and look me in the eyes and repeat that you think you have done nothing wrong.

I think we need to be realistic here.

As far as I am aware, there are presently no rules from Twitch or Relic against streaming and casting other people's matches, be it from saved replays or Observer Mode. As it stands if someone's determined to parallel cast a tournament match neither Relic nor Twitch is going to stop them.

The etiquette argument is a fair one but it's also preaching to the choir unless the people who'd parallel stream your tournament are convinced by it.

As I see it that leaves two options. Play hardball and threaten to ban unauthorized parallel streamers from the tournaments you run (which'll probably do more harm than good) or find some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement.

Most CoH 2 tournaments I've seen have a lot of matches happening simultaneously. Maybe there's a mutually beneficial deal to be made here? Tournament organizers give permission for parallel streams for most of the tournament and in return those streamers host the finals on their channels. The streamers get permission to live-cast tournament matches and the organizers get a larger viewership for the finals.

You should have mentioned in the OP that there was a statement prohibiting rebroadcasts prior to the event as that gives you more authority since there wasn't ambiguity.

Hans is a long standing member of the community and, to the best of my knowledge, your friend so handling this misunderstanding in private or a more magnanimous public post would be better than dog pilling on hans.

As for the morality around casting games through the client, I mainly talked about the legality of it. Sure, you can say it is a crappy thing to do when the official stream is going on but it can be argued having more casts of the tourny games improves hype and will lead people to the official stream. As i pointed out before, Hans is a full time variety streamer so a good portion of viewers may not know about the tourney.

Thanks for being civil about this.

I do just want to clear some things up and respond to some points I've included above.

1. Yes, I should have included this in the original post and apologise for not including this information.
2. Yes, I would say that Hans is a personal friend of mine (IRL/whatever). Myself and others did contact Hans on Facebook and Steam during his stream to ask that he stopped because it was disrespectful (we thought). It was after Hans read this that he made the speech on his stream, and that is why I wrote a public letter.
3. I agree with you that having more streams and covering all games is good. It's also cooler for the community and I don't dispute this. I would certainly want to know that we as organisers had more control over who was doing this though, especially when it's a streamer who commands such a following on Twitch and can disrupt viewership on someone else's channel.

So I do agree with this general point about more streams etc. But I would say that they did already have 2 streams covering the matches already so there was no need for Hans to create a copy broadcast of content that was already running. I do think that TO's should be able to control that.

I think we need to be realistic here.

As far as I am aware, there are presently no rules from Twitch or Relic against streaming and casting other people's matches, be it from saved replays or Observer Mode. As it stands if someone's determined to parallel cast a tournament match neither Relic nor Twitch is going to stop them.

In my original post I copied a section from Twitch's T&C's which states that you can not rebroadcast unauthorized material that doesn't belong to you. This was in relation to Hans casting from AE's stream rather than in-game.

With regards to observing an open and available game this isn't illegal or against Twitch rules, but it is wrong we feel both morally and on a level of decency. That is mainly what the post is about. Discussing whether as a community we find this acceptable and want it to continue, or whether we should implement sanctions and stricter rules

There are so many misconceptions in this thread.

People seem to be ignorant of the fact that International intellectual property rights exist, and that no formal requirement is needed to register said property.

International Intellectual Property Rights Practice outlines say thus:

IV. Registration and Formalities

A. COPYRIGHT.
International norms of copyright protection require neither registration with a central depository-though registration often remains standard procedure-nor formalities such as publication or copyright notice.
Instead, protection for a term of years is effective upon tangible expression of the work

At this stage you're just beating a dead horse. James fucked up, and doubling down on his position is a really bad PR-move but he owned up and apologized for the direct re-streaming.

Even with the arguments being made here for transparency in the eyes of the community of 800-1000 people (taken from AE's numbers provided, no actual source from me but I trust AE's given count) this clearly does nothing but divide what little remains of the staple pillars of COH.

If this were a larger community with more than like 2-10 TOs and hundreds of active pro players and what have you I'd completely get aboard this as a public post, we've had that in the past in SC2 where it's been viable to publicly oust people like this, but I fail to see the use of this over just PMing James again, talking to him after the actual stream had concluded and be like "Hey man, that's a dick move, can you not?".


Having an actual conversation with James would have been so much more constructive, as I'm sure you know this Dan, considering the fact that both you and I have had different opinions about topic X that we've voiced to James and he's been willing to listen.


Again, I disagree with James' move to publicly discuss it and make the snarky remarks in those clips provided but making this so public feels to ME like a complete waste of time and all it does is divide this community further, which is the last thing it needs. Seeing good friends of mine argue over this in such a petty manner could've all been avoided if it was kept private.

how come we can't pull on the same string and make something even greater out of this ? :< this is becoming sad.

Agree. Would like to see all content creators get together and actually decide on what is happening and support each other instead of all the infighting and egotism.

Let's be honest here, there was one person who made this public.

He not only made it public, but made it a public "fuck you" to his friends by broadcasting what he did.

I've yet to see a public apology for said behaviour, just more of the same BS he spouted in his stream. Oh, saying "I shouldn't have over dubbed the stream, but the rest was fine" is no apology at all.

There are so many misconceptions in this thread.

People seem to be ignorant of the fact that International intellectual property rights exist, and that no formal requirement is needed to register said property.

I'm fairly sure any argument along these lines ends with the content belongs to Relic. And if it doesn't the moment Relic catches a whiff of a lawyer they'll just update their Terms of Service so it does.

Bringing lawyers into something like this is the worst possible outcome for all involved.

With regards to observing an open and available game this isn't illegal or against Twitch rules, but it is wrong we feel both morally and on a level of decency. That is mainly what the post is about. Discussing whether as a community we find this acceptable and want it to continue, or whether we should implement sanctions and stricter rules

Based on the main post I thought this thread was to the effect of "this isn't okay, please stop" rather than "do we think this is this okay or not?"

At this stage you're just beating a dead horse. James fucked up, and doubling down on his position is a really bad PR-move but he owned up and apologized for the direct re-streaming.

I fail to see the use of this over just PMing James again, talking to him after the actual stream had concluded and be like "Hey man, that's a dick move, can you not?".

Having an actual conversation with James would have been so much more constructive, as I'm sure you know this Dan, considering the fact that both you and I have had different opinions about topic X that we've voiced to James and he's been willing to listen.

But I did actually message James during the event. We all did this as friends in private. He read those messages and decided to make a public statement about how fed up he was and how our content wasn't good enough to compete with his.

I also messaged him after the event with the clip I have linked in my post. Granted I did make a short sharp comment about my thoughts on it which may not have been constructive. But those private messages have been read and then completely ignored since Sunday.

I'm only stating this because I don't want people to think that I have just decided to publicly shame someone I considered a friend to me for no reason. I'm very comfortable in the way that we have handled this and I think that if James had either stopped streaming when asked by his friends or just made an apology after realising how upset it's made us then there would be no need to discuss this.

But if this behaviour is genuinely accepted and validated (By any community of any size or value) then I think that's worth a discussion and in the future we'll make sure we protect ourselves from this happening for our own personal happiness rather than relying on the decency of others.

I'm fairly sure any argument along these lines ends with the content belongs to Relic. And if it doesn't the moment Relic catches a whiff of a lawyer they'll just update their Terms of Service so it does.

Bringing lawyers into something like this is the worst possible outcome for all involved.

Nobody is going to argue about the latter part of your statement.

However, people have been spouting off that there is no legal precedent here, when there clearly is. Hans even said earlier in the thread "show me a rule that says I can't do it". Well I just did.

The tournament, the art and all associated properties belong to currahae. The footage shown on Hans channel belongs to AE. The content of the game belongs to Relic.

In the above, where does anything belong to Hans? That's right, it doesn't.

I'm sure all this can be put right, with Hans showing a bit of humility.