A form of copyright infrinement on many YouTube channels nobody has noticed

There are many YouTube channels that might not be technically speaking "scams" per se, but they are extremely lazy content that can nevertheless gain pretty large audiences (and, thus, sizeable advertisement revenue).

One of these channel types is the one that simply reposts stories from other social media websites, such as (and most typically) Reddit, showing the original text and reading it out loud (by either a person or, to more and more extents nowadays, by an AI text-to-speech program).

Note that these videos are not transformative: They just show the original text that someone posted on another social media website, as is, and just read it out loud, verbatim, and that's it. There is no commentary, no opinions, nothing extra that's not in the original text.

This is, in fact, copyright infringement, pure and simple.

Many people have the misconception that if someone posts something online, in a place that's open to the public, where anybody can read it, then that text is completely fair game to be used in any way one wants. In other words, that it's just public domain for all intents and purposes.

That's not how it works. Just because someone publishes an original work to a public place for anybody to read does not somehow waive copyright. The author still retains copyright, and it's automatically assigned to the author, and this copyright ownership doesn't need to be expressed in any way (eg. by using the copyright symbol or writing "copyright (by such-and-such)" somewhere in the text.)

Sites like Reddit have usage licenses dealing with the complexities of copyright. For example the Reddit User Agreement contains the extremely typical text of:

You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. (etc, etc, etc)

Note that, as very explicitly stated in the first paragraph quoted above, this doesn't transfer the user's copyright to Reddit, the user merely agrees to license his content to Reddit so that the site can use it pretty much as they want. However, this license does not grant third-parties the right to use that content however they want. The original author still has full copyright to his own material.

So the fact is that those YouTube channels that just copy these Reddit (and other similar social media website) posts verbatim, and add absolutely nothing to it, are very unambiguously committing a copyright violation. (Most if not all of the posts that they copy are long and original enough to very clearly fall under copyright protections even by the strictest of legal interpretations.)

And the funny thing is that nobody is even noticing this. Nobody realizes that this is copyright infringement. (This might be a situation where the original author of the text issuing a DMCA takedown notice may be completely justifiable, both legally and ethically. Of course by that point it will be mostly too late because the channel will have already gotten the vast majority of its ad revenue.)