The Olympic Committee is going after people who posted footage of the Tokyo 2020 games, according to a top Twitch streamer

• A top Twitch streamer was temporarily suspended after broadcasting 2020 Tokyo clips.
• An attorney who worked with xQc said the IOC lodged a copyright claim against the Twitch star.
• The attorney also claimed that xQc had successfully countered the claim and restored his account.

A top Twitch streamer said he was temporarily suspended from the platform after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) launched a copyright strike against him, the streamer's attorney confirmed to Insider.

The streamer, Felix Lengyel, goes by the moniker "xQcOW" or simply "xQc" on Twitch and is the sixth-most-popular personality on the platform with over 6 million followers. The 25-year-old Canadian became famous for playing video games and his offbeat reaction style.

Although the original stream is no longer available to watch, the gaming website InvenGlobal and other news outlets reported that Lengyel was temporarily suspended from Twitch on July 28 after he showed footage from the Olympic Games while streaming. His account came back online later that day.

Other platforms like Instagram have suspended creators for posting copyrighted Olympics content.

According to the Twitter account @StreamerBans, which tracks the duration of popular Twitch users' bans and is not endorsed by Twitch, Lengyel was unbanned after four hours and 55 minutes on July 28.

Lengyel tweeted about the alleged incident soon after on July 28, saying he "took necessary precautions and thought it would be fine."

Twitch must abide by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which allows people to send a takedown notice to the platform if someone is using their copyrighted work.

Ryan Morrison, an attorney who specializes in "DMCA" notices and represented Lengyel in this case, told Insider that the copyright notification came from an enforcement group working on behalf of the IOC, which he said owns the rights to the material Lengyel broadcasted.

"Countering a DMCA is a pretty par for the course situation," he said, adding that they "successfully countered" the IOC's DMCA claim. "The thing that made this interesting to people is it's a massive company and a massive streamer."

The IOC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to Twitch's "DMCA Guidelines" page, the platform "does not have the authority or ability to make legal judgments regarding allegations of copyright infringement" and can only act as the middle person between alleged rights holders and the account holder.

Lengyel said in a YouTube video that his broadcast of the 2020 Tokyo clips could be considered "transformative content," which would make it fair use and exempt from copyright strikes. Content that is "transformative" of otherwise copyright-protected material must "add something new, with a further purpose or different character," according to the US Copyright Office.

Although Twitch copyright guidelines do not specify what makes something transformative content, the platform lists parodies of "a portion of a TV show" and a "commentary on a newsworthy event" as examples of things that could evade copyright infringement violations.

Twitch did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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