I’ve been spending the past hour trying to find a song with the title “Vigor (Ft. Jet Engine).” Typing that title into Google or YouTube comes back with nothing, and all my other avenues have been exhausted, so I’m convinced the song doesn’t even exist.
However, Live Nation Entertainment, the alleged copyright holders of said song, seem to think it does exist, and also seem to think that it exists in 2014’s Bloodborne. Which it doesn’t, because Bloodborne’s soundtrack is owned by Sony and also doesn’t have a single song called “Vigor.”
Nevertheless, Live Nation seems to think it does, and it's sending out a ton of DMCA Takedowns to basically any streamer that's ever done a Bloodborne Let's Play.
One streamer in particular seems to have taken the brunt of Live Nation's copyright wrath. Lance McDonald has about 100,000 subscribers on YouTube and was handed "a ton of illegal DMCA claims" from Live Nation over this possibly fictitious song. According to Live Nation, "They’re claiming that the entire Bloodborne soundtrack is a song called 'Vigor (ft Jet Engine)'."
And it's not just Lance. Others are reporting similar DMCA strikes for over the exact same song. One guy even reported finding the song, but typing in the YouTube URL only brings up a private video.
And it's not just that particular song, either. Twitter user @maxmillian_ reported that he is getting Bloodborne DMCA strikes over the boss fight music, with Live Nation claiming they own the rights to it.
This seems a clear case of copyright trolling, but it’s still going to be a giant mess for YouTube to solve and in the meantime, these streamers have to spend hours working out what might be hundreds of DMCA strikes depending on how many Bloodborne videos they’ve made.
YouTube's woes have been ongoing, but Twitch's problems with copyright have only just started. Twitch streamers started getting DMCA strikes last October without any option to even contest the strike, resulting in lots of games suddenly going without soundtracks. That made certain music-focused games pretty hard to watch, even when the streamer themselves puts up an honest effort to bring that music back into the game in a quasi-legal fashion.