Twitch has filed a lawsuit against the unknown streamers that flooded the Twitch page for Valve’s game Artifact with streams of explicit content, despite not currently knowing the identities of those responsible.
In a statement to PC Gamer, the company says that the legal action serves to identify those involved in a concentrated effort to stream violent, pornographic, hateful, and copyrighted content on its platform.
"We take these violations extremely seriously," a Twitch representative told PC Gamer. "We are pursuing litigation to identify these bad actors, and will take all appropriate actions to protect our community."
The incident in question took place in late May, according to the lawsuit. Twitch says those involved flooded the Artifact directory with dozens of videos that violated the site’s policies and terms. Despite banning the accounts in question, new users rapidly sprung up to replace them, leading Twitch to believe it was an automated effort.
The entire affair led to the site temporarily prohibiting new accounts from starting streams and, in the longer term, now requires new users to enable two-factor authentication ahead of starting a stream.
The lawsuit itself accuses the yet-unnamed parties (currently listed as John and Janes Does 1-100) of trademark infringement, fraud, breach of contract, and unauthorized use of its services, and is seeking restitution, damages, and legal fees from those involved.