I think a real human should have to spend all day finding content and manually doing the work. Writing as someone who has been that human, in a startup creatin

I think a real human should have to spend all day finding content and manually doing the work. Writing as someone who has been that human, in a startup creating original content that someone was repeatedly ripping and uploading to YouTube after signing up with different credentials to bypass the paywall, unfortunately your approach doesn't work very well either. It's true that excessively aggressive takedowns result in YouTube not hosting some legitimate content. But it's also true that sites like YouTube allow an infringement to reach thousands or millions of people in a very short space of time, potentially completely undermining the value of the original work. If you're a Hollywood studio or big record label, you can factor piracy into the cost of doing business, and you can take steps to make it less attractive or more trouble than it's worth. If you're a small independent content creator, the economics and practicalities are entirely different. Ultimately, once content is shared the genie is out of the bottle, while relatively little content is so time-sensitive that you can't allow for challenging it and keeping it offline while the dispute is resolved, so requiring major hosts to take down by default or lose their safe harbour protections isn't unreasonable. If someone doesn't like that, they're free to host the content on their own systems instead, but such a site is unlikely to have the resources to cause the same scale of damage as a major video hosting service like YouTube or Vimeo, and if it does then it's going to be worthwhile to bring a real copyright infringement action against the site owner, who in turn is likely to be identifiable.