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> Assuming YouTube does dedup on their backend then this is the same issue that megaupload has to deal with before they were taken offline.

This is not an assumption I would make. MegaUpload was a file transfer site. Videos on YouTube do not tend to be duplicates of other videos on YouTube.

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I agree. I'll occasionally come across full episodes of TV shows on YouTube. Uploaders will try to get around copyright detection by doing things like flipping video or inserting black frames. I'm assuming a simple dedupe based block could easily be bypassed.

Publishers sometime elect to leave full episodes on YouTube either to collect passive ad revenue or just to entice people into watching more on a paid platform. For example, the 1st season of Man vs. Food can be found on YouTube in its entirety. However all the later seasons are heavily cracked down by contentID to the point that the handful of surviving episodes all had serious visual or audio distortions rendering them unwatchable - some episodes were literally uploaded with a badly tuned anaglyph 3D filter that will probably need its own algorithm (or a pair of specially purposed 3D glasses) to unscramble.

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