For people who make their livelihood through YT disputing a claim can be quite dangerous - the brand that you're maintaining (so many subscribers following such and such a name) can easily evaporate if the account is banned - then you need to build it all back up from scratch.
Yea, you're in the right, and yea, that absolutely sucks - but that's the way YT works right now, in part due to the hilariously terrible DMCA but also due to internal policies to minimize costs.
YT doesn't care if you get banned (unless you're going to lose them a bunch of eyeballs) so they're not going to defend you - and how much money do you think most content creators have to throw around in lawsuits against big corporations?
This is incorrect. The account will not be banned if you submit counternotices to all complaints.
You don't need to sue: as I explained, it's the company alleging infringement that needs to sue to keep the claim going. This is astonishingly unlikely for a clear case of fair use.
DMCA is a great policy: it's what permits YouTube to reinstate videos after a counternotice is received. Otherwise they'd just keep everything removed for fear of liability.
I'm currently suing a large company [0] for false IP claims against my Amazon account. Those are under trademark law, not copyright law, and so there's no similar ability to send a counternotice and get the claim reversed. I wish there was a similar DMCA framework applied to trademarks, it's just so much better than the status quo.
Also, YouTube has a fund to defend fair use.
[Case is Thimes Solutions Inc v Tp-link et al if you want to follow it]
Yea, you're in the right, and yea, that absolutely sucks - but that's the way YT works right now, in part due to the hilariously terrible DMCA but also due to internal policies to minimize costs.
YT doesn't care if you get banned (unless you're going to lose them a bunch of eyeballs) so they're not going to defend you - and how much money do you think most content creators have to throw around in lawsuits against big corporations?