Who was sending these notices? Sounds like perjury to me.
If a group of us formed and we did this to all of them and gunged up the system, google would be forced to improve it.
This might work between rival game streamers or something but the law offices of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe likely do not have a YouTube channel for you to retaliate against.
Even better if you created a "burner" corporation. Ie P.O. box in Delaware and act on their behalf. They have to take you seriously because corporation, amirite?
IMO the way to go is to get their contact details out of the copyright claim and sue them in small claims court.
Knowingly making a false DMCA claim is perjury, and IMO it should be treated as such. Instead companies send out automated claims in the thousands and then come back with "but we didn't know it was wrong, it was the bot!" and get away with it.
That's exactly what it is used for. It's a multibillion dollar industry that will always ask for more and more power to police their imaginary property. They even coerce other countries into adopting similar laws as part of trade agreements. I'm convinced that copyright infringement is moral and akin to civil disobedience.
Apart from classical music, bird noises and ambient noises are common cases of inaccurate YouTube takedowns.
It's notorious for false positives and how impossible those false positives are to resolve.
There's lots of them. The most notorious one I had to deal with was Adrev. There are reports of people getting notices from AdRev for videos that don't even have any music in them. [1]
[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/42xLe...
Seems like this is a great way to do copyright trolling - it's highly scalable and exists within a walled garden which means it's a legal grey area for things like this, much like how free speech on YouTube/Reddit isn't really a thing.
It's all automated. They don't verify if the claimant actually has the rights, this is left to the "dispute" process.
Sometimes multiple companies upload the same files. Sometimes the algorithm has false positives because the section of audio used is too short.
I have to wonder why anybody still uses YouTube. It can't be the community.