I agree, but the economics currently don't favor YouTube caring enough to solve this sort of problem
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.
YouTube doesn't have to adjudicate anything. They just have to demote the known bad actors to using the real DMCA process rather than their own system. They can still make a claim under penalty of perjury with a takedown but that won't count as a strike.
There's actually a lot of history (going back at least as far as 2007) that led to the current situation where the DMCA is not the process. In fairness to YouTube, they had significant legal pressure back in the day, including suits and credible threats thereof to go beyond the DMCA... which is exactly what they did.
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.
Yes, YouTube was sold to Google essentially at gunpoint. But since then the balance of power shifted from Hollywood to Google. So they they would benefit from relaxing this policy.
I would think Youtube would care enough about content creators with large number of subscribers (3blue1brown has 6.8M) to have a human review takedown notices against those channels.
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.