YouTube is way more successful than Megaupload or Napster. The difference is that YouTube went above and beyond to comply with the law and Megaupload and Napster didn't.
YouTube had virtually zero enforcement. You could upload whole shows and movies and they were never taken down.
Other sites like Google Video or Vimeo did go above and beyond to comply and they lost badly.
YouTube started getting heat at some point and that’s only when they started enforcing, but by then, they already won.
They don't have to stop pirates, just keep them in the shadows.
History just gets rewritten daily.
They took probably 10 years to attempt compliance at all. What's more, Google Video never had any organic participation (i.e. normal people uploading videos of themselves), and was almost exclusively pirated content. Its main differentiation (long forgotten in the age of youtube-dl) was actually how easy it was to download that content compared to Youtube, who made it annoying. Eventually Google realized that they still weren't going to attract the pirates/copyright violators that section 230 allowed them to use as a proxy (piracy still preferred Youtube because people were on youtube), so they bought it.
Youtube was absolutely loaded with copyrighted material, and the source of lots of pirated files still being traded is directly from youtube. Eventually they started aggressively scanning things for copyrighted music (because they wanted to make deals with the music industry), and then started preemptively responding to any DMCA claim by suspending the video so as not to look like hypocrites while they were going after music; section 230 implies a lot of helplessness for platforms in the face of users that removing audio tracks from videos where people were singing copyrighted songs doesn't bear.
They started getting rid of pirated (and amateur content in general) once they had the monopoly on video, not before. Now they wanted to push exclusive, expensively-produced content, and since producers didn't have any other online outlet, they were going to monopolize that, too. They didn't need the pirated content anymore.
That's a rewriting of history.
Google/YouTube started cracking down after Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc was reopened after appeals court ruled in Viacom's favor to listen to it's appeal in 2012 [1].
Google did develop ContentID as part of Google's damage control [0] when the case was in district court (2007-09) but half assed enforcement until the ruling in 2012 re-opened litigation, which forced Google's settlement with Viacom in 2014 [2].
People seem to forget that the Viacom litigation was an existential crisis for Google/YouTube, as the appeals court ruling could open the floodgates to litigation, and competitors ranging from Microsoft to CBS to the MPAA all supported Viacom [3]
[0] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118161295626932114
[1] - https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-viacom-lawsuit-idU...
[3] - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/via...
> They took probably 10 years to attempt compliance at all.
ContentID has existed for all but 2 years of YouTube's entire existence. It was initially released less than a year after Google's purchase.
> Youtube was absolutely loaded with copyrighted material
And if they comply with Safe Harbor, it doesn't actually matter.
By comparison, what did Napster and Megaupload do?
Napster did nothing. Their argument was that they didn't need to comply at all.
Megaupload publicly pretended to comply, but intentionally nerfed their tooling to support non-compliance, and internally documented that they weren't complying.
But regardless, that isn't true. Adsense has been a target of legal action for their illegal content:
https://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/google_settlemen...
And on top of that, their ads were ruled this month to be an illegal monopoly:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/technology/google-antitru...