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The technology has existed for a nearly 20 years.

Shazam [0] existed long before smartphones and could identify songs based on 10 second samples. YouTube can easily leverage this song-identifying technology to detect copyrighted material.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(application)

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Recognising a song is not the same as recognising copyright.

Of course not, but if it can recognize the song, and the record labels have given YouTube a list of copyrighted songs, it's not too hard to put the two together.

If you accept the false positives that impact lots of us, then sure, it's not too hard. This is one of those cases where 99% is easy but society needs 100% and that's not as easy.

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