Stealing other people's content to make a YouTube video, committing plagiarism and/or possibly copyright infringement? What's new? It has been a plague in YouTube since its very inception.
Some of the plagiarism is actually surprisingly elaborate, with authors going to great lengths and putting effort into videos... which are just almost direct copies of other people's videos. Othertimes it's just extremely lazy and sometimes even inadvertent copyright infringement, like those videos that do nothing but read some Reddit posts aloud (the authors probably not even realizing that technically speaking they are committing copyright infringement by doing that.)
One rather similar form of extremely lazy content theft (and possibly copyright infringement) has become extremely popular in later years. This form of video content is nothing new, and has been going on for a decade or more. However, the amount of such videos has absolutely exploded in later years, particularly with the advent and popularity of "YouTube Shorts".
And that is: Taking someone else's video and reuploading it as-is, only adding some extremely generic footage of the channel owner "reacting" to the video. The "reaction" clip may be attached to a corner, to the side, or below the original video (especially in YouTube Shorts, which are extremely tall and narrow), often even without saying a word.
Or, as has become very common with some authors, adding a 2-second clip of the author saying something and then just playing the original video without any modification.
In the most egregious cases those clips are actually prerecorded snippets, not the author actually reacting and commenting on the video. You can clearly see this when the same "this is rather egregious, check this out" clip is used in multiple such "reaction" videos, and the comment doesn't mention any specifics about the original video. It's quite clear that the channel owner just prerecorded a couple dozen such comments on camera, and is then just lazily choosing one of them, attaching it at the beginning of the original video, and uploading it. This probably takes so little time that rendering the video and uploading it to YouTube takes longer than editing the video. The editing part itself probably takes literally less than a minute.
And the thing is, this is not being done only by some obscure tiny 100-subscriber channels. Sometimes it's being done by enormous million-subscriber channels, some of them having become infamous for it.
They are trying to bypass copyright by claiming that it's "commentary" and, thus, falls under the Fair Use doctrine. Problem is, they are not actually commenting anything about the videos in question: With some channels they aren't actually saying anything, with others they are just using prerecorded 2-second snippets.
And the problem is that, particularly when it comes to those bigger channels, they are successfully fooling the YouTube algorithm, which just keeps promoting their videos and recommending it to people, and thus those stolen borderline-copyright-infringing reuploads are getting hundreds of thousands of views, perhaps even millions, and thus the channel authors are getting rich by stealing other people's content and reuploading them with almost no effort put into them at all.
They have found the perfect theft scheme: Browse YouTube, steal interesting minute-long videos, load them into a video editing software, attach a 2-second prerecorded clip of them "reacting" to it, render, upload. The entire process takes probably just a few minutes per video, and they may get thousands of dollars of ad revenue for each such video. It's the perfect get-rich-quick scheme.
And, so far, YouTube is not doing anything about it.
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