There should be very strict counter penalties for false claims in my opinion. I once received a dmca from a much larger (foreign) company than us. Result was complete loss of revenue for one month. We survived, but it felt like a mafia action. Unfair and powerless.
Suing a foreign company is something like 5-25x more expensive and less likely to be successful. It's a huge defect in the DMCA that they can do this - every lawyer I talked to for a similar problem told me not to bother.
It's almost crazy that someone hasn't come up with an insurance company for false DCMA claims. They'd probably be rolling in cash and it would put some serious pressure on people throwing their weight around.
I'm not sure the economics would work out. It seems like it would be tough to get the bad actors to pay out in court beyond getting your legal fees back. In many cases they're basically just little scam corporations without many real assets that exist to cause trouble on behalf of the real bad actors.
That's not how insurance companies work. Basically, the amount of YouTubers out there paying a monthly fee to
1. continue getting income while a dispute is ongoing,
2. potential payout if it goes to court/settled.
Basically, the insurance company would probably very rarely go to court; they'd only do it if they knew they would win hands-down. Otherwise, they would probably just send threatening letters (which lawyers are good at) and take a token sum (if anything).
In reality, getting a false DCMA takedown is pretty rare (if the amount of YouTube content is anything to go by).
And lets not mention all the free publicity you'd get when a YouTuber does get one, because they all apparently, rant and rave about how they got their video taken down when it is taken down.
