Or, perhaps, "theft" is not technically speaking the right term to use, because it implies that the action is illegal, which in these cases it might not technically be. However, it's an extremely common practice and it's tiresome.
Whether one likes YouTube's copyright enforcement system or not, at least it does have the positive effect that if you create and upload an original video, if someone just downloads it and uploads it as-is on their own channel, you can take it down immediately when you notice.
However, what happens when the footage is public domain, or in other ways not really falling under copyright of an entity who could take it down?
One example of such footage is, in the United States, court camera videos: These are in the public domain by law, and thus anybody can distribute them as they want. There are also many other similar examples of footage created by the government or other entities that do not fall under copyright (or where the copyright is not being enforced.)
There are many, many channels on YouTube that are dedicated to such videos, some of the extremely prolific, uploading literally several videos every day, and thus hundreds of videos per month. Quite a good source of revenue for extremely little effort, even if every video only gets a few thousands of views (the sheer amount of videos can actually make it quite profitable, for essentially zero effort.)
But how to get a slice of that pie, if you can't be bothered to scour the various governmental websites for such videos?
Easy: Just steal the videos from those other channels and just upload them as-is.
Some of these copycat channels try to be sneaky by reversing the video horizontally (an extremely common tactic. Apparently for some unfathomable reason this fools YouTube's automatic copyright detection system? One would think that it would be absolutely trivial, just a few lines of code, to compare videos normally and horizontally reversed, but who knows. Seemingly it works because a lot of channels have been doing this for years.)
Oftentimes the primary YouTube channel that uploads such public domain (or non-enforced) videos puts its watermark on the video. The cleverer ones make the watermark actually slowly move across the image like the famous DVD screensaver to stop other channels from trying to hide or remove it.
The copycat channels are unfazed by this. In most of the stolen videos you can still see the moving watermark of the original channel where the video was stolen from (often just horizontally reversed).
And this is absolutely rampant. For every such video that's originally uploaded to a YouTube channel there are at least a dozen other channels that just copy and reupload it. Original watermarks intact and all, perhaps the video only horizontally reversed.
And the thing is: In many cases it works. Even those copycat channels often end up getting at least thousands of views per video. While one single such video doesn't give a significant amount of revenue, steal and upload enough of them per month, and that's a good 100 to 1000 USD per month of ad revenue. For pretty much no work at all.
And the thing is: As far as I know, if the original footage is public domain, this is not even illegal. People copying and reuploading other people's public domain videos does not break the law, unless those other videos actually contain some original content, such as commentary (which many don't.)
Legal? Probably. Ethical? Opinions vary. Tiresome? Very much so! It really is tiresome to encounter the same videos that I have already seen, again and again, on different channels.
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