The number of cases that actually need manual moderation would be many orders of magnitude smaller.
Imagine a system that works something like the following:
- Users get access to manual dispute resolution by proving their real identity
- Persons with enough obvious violations (i.e. outright piracy with no possible argument of fair use) are barred from the dispute process
- All disputes get sent to human moderators and handled within 24 hours
- There are multiple levels of appeals, starting at appeals to unskilled laborers and ending at appeals to experienced copyright attorneys
- Going to higher levels of appeals requires paying in a nominal fee that is returned if the claim is overturned
- The final level of appeals can decide the case is too unclear and should be handled by the courts as per the DMCA
- Claimants are penalized some nominal fee for overturned claims
How many moderators would that need? It'd be 1,000 at most. Majority of them would be outsourced laborers costing around $20-30k, with a few experienced attorneys costing $200-300k for the final stage of appeals. Total cost $20-30M. That's a lot of money, but still only 0.5% of their actual revenue. Such a system would surely create far more value both to the company and to the world.