Fighting them legally might work temporarily, but eventually new viewbot services will arise in other countries that can't be reached legally.<p>I'm very interested in what measures they use to detect viewbots now. What's stopping twitch themselves from buying a viewbot package for a fake streamer, then shadow banning all the accounts and IPs that show up? There also may be clever statistical methods to detect them.<p>Ad companies and big websites like youtube also face this problem. It's not unique to twitch. In fact I think most sites with user content have had to deal with spam bots at some point.
The blog post notably downplays the severity of the linked lawsuit. (<a href="http://cl.ly/013D2U0t2U0C" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/013D2U0t2U0C</a>)<p>It is thorough, especially with an invocation of the CFAA.
I think eventually this will work its way out with people using popular streamers as consultants for how to improve streams, potentially with them taking a cut of the stream revenue. It is something that will probably happen as some streamers no longer want to stream or do it as a side job or something to do to reduce the overall days of streaming. I assume that although one might enjoy streaming, after enough time on twitch I am guessing streamers would like to take a few months off and this seems like the most relevant way to maximize the expertise they have gained.