Google seems incapable of admitting that humans are still a necessary component in these sorts of things. You see the same thing play out in many other Google services.
The solution that I'm proposing does not. At least, not YouTube employees. It would work like this:
1. Offer "the claimant doesn't have copyright for that audio" as one of the options.
2. You supply the proof of this (as it already works)
3. The claimant reviews this proof (as it already works) In my case, it's going to their own website and seeing that they are claiming rights on a public domain music.
4. The claimant releases the claim
5. YouTube marks that the claimant has no rights over that audio and they cannot pester anyone else with that. This would only work if I select that they don't own the copyright in the first step, and they acknowledge it themselves in step 4.
Basically, all it changes is adding one more checkbox when fighting a claim and aftermath that the claimant has confirmed themselves that they don't actually own copyright to that work.
How my video with 47 million views was stolen on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4AeoAWGJBw
ContentID.
But I feel like that's good. It means that the audio is already in YouTube database, so YouTube could simply remove that audio from that claimant's "library" of protected works.
Tos is meaningless. You can break it. There is pretty much never going to be any real consequence for doing so.
"an email". You're lucky.
I got a couple of videos with Creative Commons music. I also contacted the original author and copyright holder about this. Apparently CDBaby just took his songs and files copyright claims on all YouTube videos with his music. He's a poor guy from Australia and has no resources to go against them. So, now, every time I get a copyright claim, I have to challenge it. After giving the evidence, they just let me have it, wait a couple of weeks and submit the same claim again.
What's funny is that if you go to that album's page on CD Baby, you can see that the Creative Commons license and original author's name and copyright are right there next to the option to listen to the songs.
After numerous claims, I finally gave up and just removed the audio track on all the videos myself.
If you read the thing carefully, YouTube doesn't even review the case. Whatever you write there goes directly to people claiming to be the "copyright holder".
YouTube should really have an option "The claimant doesn't have copyright on this material". If you give enough evidence, and if they release the claim on video after that was checked, the claimant should lose the right to claim copyright on that audio match for all videos.