Um, apparently the underlying problem is that someone claimed a clearly public domain melody in Google's copyright enforcement system. And the public domain status can be proven very easily since sites like IMSLP make early PD editions of classical music readily available to anyone. Wouldn't OP have a claim for tortious interference against whoever claimed this content in a clearly fraudulent way?
I'm not a lawyer, and we weren't monetizing our videos anyway. But it's still such BS. While I know that this claim will be thrown out by Google since it was contested (and apparently the claimant won't get any money from monetization --- although we won't either, since we don't monetize), I'm mostly just annoyed that Google's system is definitely letting tons of people make money from those who don't contest the claims. But I can't change that myself --- I don't work for Google, and even if we were to go to court and win (assuming we had grounds to sue in the first place), no court would require Google to change their system in that way (I suspect).
It might not make financial sense for an individual to sue for any particular infraction, but pooling might result in economics of scale that make it worthwhile to pursue infringers.
Google is “complicit” (at least in the moral sense, not sure about the legal sense) by providing a broken service that appears to be unable to distinguish different performances of public domain works.
But the principal legal and moral burden is still on the takedown claimant to represent that a certain video is indeed copyright infringement and not another performance altogether or fair use of copyrighted works. They should not be able to get away with large-scale false statements. Even for claims that relate to actual copyright infringement, they could not have a “good faith belief” of copyright infringement because they are simply relying on a known broken system (of Google) without appropriately verifying their claims, even after many successful disputes relating to the same issue.
If they were actually following the process in the DMCA, then as soon as the original poster made a counter-claim, Google could put it back up and the claimant's only recourse would be to take legal action against the poster.
So for any registry to work you would have to go through every video and mark exactly what parts you claim copyright for, which parts you do not claim copyright for and who else might hold copyright. Basically you would end up killing the automation, which would most likely piss of the movie and music cartels/lobbyists.
> So for any registry to work you would have to go through every video and mark exactly what parts you claim copyright for, which parts you do not claim copyright for and who else might hold copyright. Basically you would end up killing the automation, which would most likely piss of the movie and music cartels/lobbyists.
That would be a feature, not a bug.
Tortious interference applies quite generally, it doesn't require anything as specific as the DMCA. These compositions were entered into Content ID, which means someone has clearly made a false claim to being the holder of publishing rights wrt. melodies that were actually in the public domain.
I guess another way of getting around that would be to get multiple copyrighted performances of a public domain composition added to ContentID.