If a YouTube video contains copyrighted material, the copyright owner has several choices about what to do about it, such as just allowing it, demonetization, or taking the revenue from the video.
They also have the option to just issue a copyright strike.
A copyright strike is the most drastic of all the options: Not only will the video be completely removed from YouTube, but the channel will be permanently issued a strike, for its entirety of existence. What makes this very draconian is that if a channel gets three copyright strikes, the entire channel will be automatically deleted.
Obviously this system exists to remove channels that do nothing but distribute copyrighted material.
The main problem with this is that the system does not take anything else into account about the channel.
A YouTube creator could literally produce and publish thousands videos over the span of 10 years, get a copyright strike on one video, get another strike on another video 4 years later, and then get a third strike on a third video 5 years from that, and suddenly there is no channel. Even though the channel may have published three thousand videos that have no copyright issues of any kind, and it's all original content, if merely three videos out of those three thousand get a strike, the entire channel, including the three thousand videos, gets deleted.
And, to reiterate, it doesn't matter how far apart in time the copyright strikes are. It's not like the channels has to get three strikes in three days in order to get removed. It can be three strikes in the span of ten years, and it makes no difference.
Which makes absolutely no sense. It should be clear to anybody that if a channel has uploaded thousands of videos over the span of a decade, none of which have any copyright issues, except for three of them, which were published years apart, then it's quite clear that this is not some kind of wannabe pirate who is trying to distribute copyrighted material. It's quite likely that the copyright infringements were mistakes or small carelessness. It's quite clear that all of the thousands of videos shouldn't be removed just because three of them received copyright strikes.
Obviously it should be that those particular videos should be removed, not the entire channel.
Also, note that even when a particular video gets a copyright strike, the contents of the video don't matter. Even if it's a 30-minute video with a 30-second segment containing the infringing material, everything else being original work by the author, the entire video is struck.
It would be different if the channel had like 5 videos in total, 3 of them getting a copyright strike (especially if the strikes are issued within days or a few weeks), and those videos would contain nothing but copyrighted material (eg. entire music videos). Then it would make more sense to just delete the channel, as it seems to do pretty much nothing but to distribute copyrighted material.
The copyright strike system in YouTube is in dire need of reform. The rest of the content of the channel should count towards whether the entire channel is removed (instead of just the infringing videos). Perhaps something like if less than 10% of the videos in the channel are infringing, then the channel doesn't get deleted, or something along those lines.
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