Comment Licenses are not ownership. (Score 4, Informative) 34
Belong? No. Twitch (Amazon) gets a license to the content. Here's what they think gives them the right to do this:
(i) Unless otherwise agreed to in a written agreement between you and Twitch that was signed by an authorized representative of Twitch, if you submit, transmit, display, perform, post, or store User Content using the Twitch Services, you grant Twitch and its sub-licensees, to the furthest extent and for the maximum duration permitted by applicable law (including in perpetuity if permitted under applicable law), an unrestricted, worldwide, irrevocable, fully sub-licenseable, nonexclusive, and royalty-free right to: (a) use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display your User Content (including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Twitch Services (and derivative works thereof)) in any form, format, media, or media channels now known or later developed or discovered; and (b) use the name, identity, likeness, and voice (or other biographical information) that you submit in connection with such User Content. Twitch can exercise these rights in connection with Twitch and/or its affiliates' business. (source)
But the content is not theirs to do with as they please. It still belongs to Twitch streamers. Twitch needs a license to their content so they can transcode it to all the resolutions they support on the fly (a derivative work) and display/perform it on the viewers' computers. That's fair. But training models is not connected with the usual business of Twitch, which consists of sending the streams to viewers, providing the chat on which they interact with the streamer and other things they might call the Twitch "experience". It's the same thing book publishers are fighting in the courts against LLM companies: can Twitch (Amazon) do this if all they have is a license and don't own the content?
By their own admission, they had to force everyone to opt in because nobody would have if they didn't force it. That includes streamers who have since become incapacitated or died and can't exercise their right to opt out.
It's also unclear whether people's content will be erased from the model when they opt out, in a future training iteration, or at all.
This is not legal advice.