If you responded to the copyright takedown request(s) in an automated fashion, you might have a chance. I don't know if it's a requirement for you to police it

If you responded to the copyright takedown request(s) in an automated fashion, you might have a chance. I don't know if it's a requirement for you to police it. Only to respond to the DMCA requests. So make the website, under a corporation (which is easy to do), then build a system which auto takes down pending moderation for every DMCA request. Obviously, this won't scale immediately, but use mechanical Turk to review the requests initially. Once you know content is copyrighted, keep it. Use it to compare against other uploads. YouTube doesn't screen every copyrightable material. Once you get started, get some money, then try to make deals.