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> Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance, we see this happening to content creators all the time for no good reason. If these videos get the thumbs up to stay up, they're in cahoots with copyright holders somehow (most likely) or are deliberately ignored for some other reason. One think you'll notice is that not just corporate sponsored content is region-locked; sometimes "anonymous" user videos get region locked. That is not a coincidence.

This is all much less nefarious than you make it sound.

When a rights-holder finds their IP in a video, they have the option of how to proceed. They can choose to take the video down completely, run ads and receive all or a share of the revenue, etc.

If they choose to leave it up, it's almost always because they are receiving all of the revenue from the video now so they have no reason to take it down. There's no smokey back room deals going on here, this is just the rights enforcement tools provided by YouTube.

Rights-holders do not always hold global rights to content and if the video contains content from multiple rights-holders, there are several competing claims that all need to be resolved.

The reason the videos uploaded by users eventually end up resembling the videos uploaded by the rights-holder is because YouTube provides a mechanism for rights-holders to enforce the same restrictions they operate under on their content even when they weren't the ones to upload it.

Source: I work in a company that does this, though not directly on that side of the business.

There are account penalization i.e. a strike system associated with frequent infringement complaints, and it doesn't take many. While it's certainly the case that copyright holders will simply take over the revenue from unauthorized videos, my expectation is that most of these uploaders are not unwitting anonymous types: they actually represent the company. I had read an article years ago detailing that this can be the case but I can't be arsed to find it right now.

It's not a huge leap when you consider it's also been revealed that a good chunk of torrents at one time had been seeded by IPs belonging to corporates.

Not in the beginning. You could find whole seasons of various copyrighted shows no problem.

You still can, usually they take up like only 2/3 of the image though.

And they're sped up by like 50%.

Youtube has broad 'covenant not to sue' contracts with various rights holding organizations which allows them to safely leave up infringing works while the rights holders can avoid paying residuals to artists whos contracts lacked the foresight to anticipate this kind of fraud.

AFAIK porn performers don't generally get paid residuals, so there probably less interest in this sort of skulduggery.

This most certainly wasn't the case for YouTube in the early days either. Once Google took over they were WAY more strict about locking down infringing works.

> Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance

This is not universally true. For example, you can go on YouTube right now and probably find all sorts of music videos not hosted by the actual artists, so long as it’s older or more obscure music. Plus at this point it’s kind of moot; they already gained their user base from the first several years of illegal new content.

No, dude. I remember back in college when Youtube was the source for copyrighted content. That's how they got their start.

If youtube user bigbubba420 uploads a music video for an 80s synthpop song he doesn't own, the copyright owner for that video informs youtube of their ownership claim and revenue from the video an anonymous user uploaded is redirected into their pockets.

This is true, though now bigbubba420 gets a strike on his account for the complaint and inches closer to a ban. And music uploaders throw on a ton of content, so I don't see how it can merely be a case of ad revenues taken over and continuing to do the same with impunity.

Also if travel_vlogger happens to walk by a store playing the radio, the ownership of their video and revenue is given to the music company and you can't do anything about it. Just easier to steal from the little guy.

Be aware you're comparing Google to a much smaller company. Of course they had the ability to do full DRM search much sooner. I'd look through the lens of technical hurdles much before I'd look through the lens of moralism.

This is a good point. I don't think MindGeek is as sophisticated in detecting and taking down infringing content. However, complaints do get filed and videos do get taken down for infringing.

> videos do get taken down for infringing.

After a Lot of suffering. I believe there was an incident recently in which Pornhub refused to take down videos of a minor in what was an obvious situation of revenge porn.

I mean in the case of infringing on copyright. It's near instant. As far as revenge porn I don't think they gave it much thought.

Yeah, well that means they got their priorities reversed badly, for this kind of business.

I think the current model should have been the default from the start - if verified, paid content creators were the only ones allowed, they would get a much bigger share from their videos.

Thank fuck Ryan Creamer was verified.

> Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance,

Yeah, right. Tell that to the flood of channels which will take cut single scenes out of tv series and twitch recordings and upload them to YT monetized.

Isn't there some limited amount reproduction fair use?

I would expect it applies to the separate cases, but not to an account which exists only for that purpose. There are cases where whole episodes / movies are split into pieces and posted in a playlist.