A common misunderstanding: There is no formal/legal claim of infringement being made anywhere in the ContentID process, it's just the automated process YouTube

A common misunderstanding: There is no formal/legal claim of infringement being made anywhere in the ContentID process, it's just the automated process YouTube uses to decide whether or not to take down a video. Any formal/legal claims of infringement should be made by the right-holders industry towards YouTube (which YouTube really wants to avoid) not the uploader. The DCMA was made to facilitate this, but for a huge platform such as YouTube it just falls short. Here's the important part, let it sink in very clearly: ContentID is a deal that YouTube made, demanded by the larger players in the right-holders industry that goes (something) like: IF the big right-holders can easily make large amounts of claims, and YouTube provides some sort of ML detecting filter to scan for possible infringements, and when flagged the ContentID process will handle these cases such and such, THEN the big right-holder industry people won't file gigantic claims of infringements and take down requests to YouTube. From the perspective of the little uploader, no courts, claims or legal things are involved. You have no legal relation with the right-holders when YouTube takes down your vid for infringement. You can't sue YouTube for taking down your vid since as a US corporation they have every right to take down any video for whatever reason (and TOS, but mostly because big corporations just get to do whatever). And that reason is mainly: Whatever keeps the big right-holders happy. YouTube is first and foremost interested in keeping the big right-holders happy, and of course keeping their advertisers happy. That's it. They're not interested in being fair or even ethical (as the recent Logan Paul drama has shown us--considering that YouTube's trending videos are hand-picked by humans ...). ContentID is not at ALL about YouTube dealing with copyright infringement in general. If you write, perform and record an original song with your band and upload it, ContentID is not going to protect you. It's just there to help the big players scan for their own stuff and then flag whatever. If they accidentally flag the wrong thing, original content or even the actual original sample (if it's not licensed to the big right-holders) that was used in a newer big right-holder licensed work, then it's going to get removed. A false positive is only a very tiny little "oops" for YouTube, they don't really care. The dispute thingy is just a pacifier. They have literally zero reason to reduce their false positive rate. The software works; the big right holders are happy.