In fact, everything aligns to incentivize them not to care: making the barrier to make a successful claim higher and the larger rights-holders start to cause problems; the cost of seriously adjudicating claims is substantial and may well be unsustainable.
The consequences of bad policy are also quite low for them: most channels that will get hit unjustly have too small an audience to be heard; fixing problems for the larger creators is one-off enough that it's simply cost efficient to squash those when they happen; any bad publicity doesn't seem to be sufficient enough to cause a siginficant drop in either viewers or content creators willing to stick with the platform.... in fact I expect most content creators so unjustly hit this way would simply swallow the indignity and loss and continue p YouTube.
I don't know the laws or agreements at play here, but it seems like some sort of class action suit, if feasible, would be the only way to scale these complaints into something that YouTube management might take seriously.
We can speculate to if the current situation is the natural conclusion of those agreements with major IP holders, or if they simply got religion and now embrace those practices... but at least historically, it wasn't simply management discretion which started them on this path.
I don't dispute there are things they can, and should do, nor do I dispute that their current management of the problem sucks.... but it's not quite as simple as just taking a decision to abide by the DMCA as-is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...
> has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network of, a policy that provides for the *termination* in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are *repeat infringers*
https://www.aclu.org/documents/text-digital-millennium-copyr...
In effect, the YouTube copyright system is a purely "voluntary" system for taking down copyright content, that goes way beyond the DMCA. It's basically designed to ensure theres no possible repercussions for issuers of copyright claims, even claims clearly made in bad faith.
The differences between these two systems are explained here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7002106
Naturally, that's not the process YouTube follows including, again as I understand it, the assignment of revenues, etc. with only their internal dispute process mattering.
"Videos removed or blocked due to YouTube's contractual obligations
(...)
Sometimes, this may mean the Content ID appeals and counter notification processes won't be available."