"I spent about a week doing brute force trial-and-error. I would privately upload several different essay clips, then see which got flagged and which didn’t. This gave me a rough idea what the system could detect, and I edited the videos to avoid those potholes."
It is amazing the hoops people have to go through to enjoy the rights provided by law.
It would be interesting to know what they found about where the boundaries lie and how this compares to the "traditional" approach - sample clearance. I'm fairly sure that if you tried to get approval for using lots of micro-clips it would be incredibly time-consuming, prohibitively expensive, or both.
But approval is not needed. These videos are pretty much textbook examples of legally-protected fair use of the content they discuss. The labor necessary to get such content through the gates at YouTube is stifling others who can’t dedicate the kind of time needed to skirt their overzealous copyright protections.
I mean, obviously? The choices are: pay the money, or accept the limitations of a free service.
> cease-and-desist letters
It's an imperfect system. I wish that there were fines for making false IP claims.