Every now and then, Youtube messes up. Every now and then, someone will go and complain that youtube allowed someone to steal monetization off their videos and did nothing to fix the issue — and when people aren’t complaining about bogus copyright claims by copyright trolls or unjust demonetization, video (and even channel) removals, there’s some twats running around slapping illegitimate DMCA takedowns.
Major incidents usually happen once every few months, prompting some angry posts on social media. However, it has never happened that we’d get three major ‘offenses’ in about the same week.
The Fat Rat incident
Normally, small channels are the most vulnerable to having their monetization stolen by copyright trolls. However, it turns out that big names aren’t exactly immune to that sort of thing, either.
TL;DW: TheFatRat (a fairly popular producer, who releases songs for people to more or less freely use in their videos) had his song effectively stolen by some Columbian “music label” and the story goes like this: some twat made a remix of TheFatRat’s song, uploaded it to youtube, his label then decided to steal monetization from TheFatRat.
“What a douchebag,” most would think, and go to condemn both the guy who made a bootleg remix as well as his label. But wait, it’s even worse.
Turns out that the guy who made the remix wasn’t really a twat. It seems that he was decent enough to include proper credit. Not only that, but he claims that he doesn’t even know the label that stole monetization from TheFatRat

Youtube’s response so far basically, as usual, amounts to ‘go fuck yourself’. However, you don’t even need to use any copyrighted material in order to get a bogus claim.
The Bohemian Rhapsody
Remember the guy who made that Why is everyone lying about Bohemian Rhapsody video? Yep. He got claimed too.
Moral of the story: get some lube. If music (and movie industry, and until very recently Nintendo) decide to steal your ad revenue you can only get bent and do nothing.
DMCA As A Censorship Service
Youtube always siding with people claiming copyright infringement means that you can effectively use it to censor anyone saying shit you don’t like with absolutely no consequences. I mean yes, theoretically you could get sued, but in reality that’s one thing that isn’t going to happen at all.
Which means that if you’re a shithead (or a scam artists, or both) who can’t handle people criticizing you or the product you’re making, you can just have them wiped off the face of Youtube
And that’s exactly what happened when someone pointed out some serious problems with a game Escape from Tarkov.
And then they even doubled down, admitting they did it and explained why.
The worst thing: nothing can be done about that
The rules that allow all this were basically written by the music industry “because piracy.” And while Youtube could do things that would help content creators, they really don’t wanna. It would cost them money and it’s really against their interests
This brings us to one of the problems that cause this situation: Youtube has monopoly, and any emerging competitor will not be able to compete with it. Some have tried — vid.me, vimeo, dailymotion, liveleak — but they all only found their niche (liveleak — videos of bad accidents, vimeo — art), some have closed down (vid.me), some have had their funding cut because over-zealous leftist normies (bitchute) and some are currently considered ‘geek territory’ because term ‘open source’ scares people for some reason (peertube).