Why was Voyboy banned from Twitch?

League of Legends streamer Joedat “Voyboy” Esfahani has been banned from Twitch.

Voyboy was in the middle of his regularly scheduled stream when Twitch hit him with a ban. Voyboy went on Twitter to explain that he doesn’t know the reason for his ban, while Twitch is yet to comment on the situation. By the time of this report, Voyboy had been banned for four hours and counting.

Voyboy is not one of the problematic League of Legends streamers and he doesn’t find himself in the middle of controversy very often. In fact, Voyboy uses his platform to attempt to improve the League of Legends environment, and is seen as a beacon of positivity in the scene.

Back in May, Voyboy posted a rant discussing the poor state of solo queue in North America. The streamer addressed developer Riot Games’ lack of punishment for toxic players and how the developer couldn’t or didn’t want to handle the problem.

“You can ask almost anyone and you will get a resounding agreement that the playerbase has gotten more toxic, there’s a lot more griefers, a lot more people inting games, going AFK because someone annoyed them, or just for no reason,” Voyboy said at the time.

Riot took this message into consideration and started implementing measures to better prevent toxic in-game behavior. If those measures were enough is yet to be seen.

Was Voyboy banned on Twitch for DMCA?

If it’s not his behavior that got Voyboy banned, it might be a violation of the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act, also known as DMCA. Back in October, Twitch started deleting clips and entire VODs from some channels while alleging copyright infringement because of the music and other copyrighted works that had been used in those streams. The decision affected everyone from small streamers to the biggest names on Twitch, many of whom suddenly lost years of work. Twitch deleted all content and didn’t allow some streamers the opportunity to back it up or otherwise archive it.

Twitch is encouraging streamers to learn more about copyright law, but it isn’t providing any kind of explicit guidance on the subject. Streamers are left to their own devices while the platform is butchering their content as it pleases.

Whether this is what happened to Voyboy is yet unknown, but a DMCA ban seems a definite possibility for one of the biggest LoL streamers on Twitch.