YouTube is doing more work than they need to, but probably because it costs them less effort and time to just side with copyright claim holders and act as a tho

YouTube is doing more work than they need to, but probably because it costs them less effort and time to just side with copyright claim holders and act as a thorn to users who would use the content. To put a fine point on it: there's a cultural attitude I've observed within Google[1] against doing anything that "won't scale." Both for better and worse, this manifests in a lot of Google products. A corollary of this guiding principle seems to be that having a real human being in the loop is anathema, even if the resulting end-user experience is terrible. Annoyingly, this approach seems to take precedence even when the need for scale is in some indeterminate future and when the current experience is poor. As JWZ rightly calls out, this is him versus "the robots". This is probably exactly right, and completely fucked up w.r.t. any reasonable balance of fair use rights. It's kind of crazy that there's even a form that asks for input of the kind a human would read. [1] From multiple discussions with Googlers, as well as various public articles by same.