Today were the opening ceremonies for BlizzCon, the annual event that fans of Blizzard Entertainment love Diablo Starcraft World of Warcraft Hearthstone, and more: get together to celebrate the company’s games, and get a glimpse of all that is to come new things. And despite being fully online this year – or ‘BlizzConline’, as it was clumsily merged – the event still had some significant revelations today, including news that fan favorite Diablo II will be remastered and re-released later this year. What BlizzCon 2021 wasn’t, however, was hilarious – at least not until Metallica took ‘the stage’.
In any other year, one of the world’s greatest dad rock bands hanging out with the collective orcs of the Blizzard fanbase would just be another hype-creating moment for BlizzCon visitors. This year, however, the opening ceremonies were broadcast online from both the official BlizzCon page, YouTube and Twitch. And you know what happens when licensed music is played on the internet, don’t you people? That’s right: copyright issues!
Per Uproxx, the audio from James, Lars, and the guys’ gig apparently went out on YouTube and the BlizzCon page as usual – although it seems like the whole thing was left out of the event’s YouTube upload. But on Twitch … Twitch was not so good. That is to say, although it was hosted on the company’s official twitchgaming channel, the execution was ominous preceded by a chyron indicating that “The forthcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the appropriate copyright holder.” And then this happened:
(You can see it for yourself at Twitch’s broadcast of the eventThe Metallica stuff starts at about 1:10:00.
And look: we can prove that someone at Twitch on purpose chose the most dorky Zelda forest donkey music imaginable to make Metallica rock their hearts, instead of broadcasting their extremely copyrighted music (aand thus have to do with the possibility of issuing one of their ubiquitous ones DMCA takedown requests for themselves Obviously not, just as we can’t provide definitive proof that Twitch then switched to, like, “lo-fi beats to hit publiclyTo finish the set. It is quite possible that was just, you know, the copyright-free audio that Twitch had on hand, which they then simply chose to dub about one of the most popular rock bands of all time. On the other hand, we can prove it’s extremely funny to watch this happen, especially – as many people have commented – since Metallica is at least partly responsible for the restrictive nature of many of the online music streaming laws that dominate the internet today, after their high profile campaign against Napster long ago at the beginning of the mp3.