I'm pretty sure the actual reason the Content ID and copyright strike system exists because Google was tired of getting sued by everybody. DMCA should've made i

I'm pretty sure the actual reason the Content ID and copyright strike system exists because Google was tired of getting sued by everybody. DMCA should've made it so that they effectively didn't have much liability, but they were getting sued by Viacom and probably would continue to be sued by just about everyone else, too (in an era where afaik YouTube remained unprofitable.) To quote them: > "[YouTube] goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works." But media companies didn't like far beyond legal obligations, they wanted more. And existentially, maybe YouTube was right to do that. Today, YouTube is clearly profitable and it's more culturally relevant than television in many places. But 10 years ago, it was edgy and new, scrappy, it didn't have as much mainstream appeal, and even if they ultimately won all of those lawsuits eventually, it would've left them with a ridiculous amount of legal spending and a bunch of possibly permanently severed relationships with the media companies that had all of the money. I don't think Google wanted to just delete channels of everybody. I think they did want to delete channels of people who were just splitting Family Guy episodes into 15 minute chunks and uploading that, but definitely there's a reason why copyright claims on YouTube today have more cardinality (depending on the kind of claim, for example, it can result in ad revenue going to the claimant, geoblocking, etc. Which also can be bad outcomes, but is a better outcome than just demolishing people's channels.) Google is a lot more on the evil end of things today than they ever were, but back when all of this went down in 2010-2014 it wasn't so bad. I think YouTube's compromise reflects more than just problems with Google. I think they developed a copyright system that would prevent them from being in constant legal turmoil indefinitely.