Me and a mate have a playlist of stuff to watch when we get together and drink beers. I keep meaning to track/archive it because give it a month and there'll be 2 or 3 out of ~20 videos deleted. The decay is immense.

Are you familiar with youtube-dl? It can download an entire public playlist - ignoring videos previously downloaded - and easy to run it on a schedule.

What is happening at youtube? Do they delete old content? Only storing a single copy for old content and the disks are dying?

Sometimes, sometimes the accounts get deleted for one reason or another. Lot of the old channels seem to be taken over by boots too. One of my very old videos seemed to have gotten corrupted even.

Copyright takedowns, probably.

I made a video using YouTube's own Audio tracks thing and put a classical piano tuner from its library. It still got a copy right claim and someone makes money every view.

How? The track is from YouTube. It was written more than two hundred years ago. In any case, a claim against YouTube's own tracks should be auto rejected and the violater banned. Instead...

Why?

The realpolitik answer is that this is where the barbed wire ended up in the war between copyright holders and internet companies. It's a situation that satisfies nobody, but both sides get to continue making money. Justice has very little to do with it.

Performance copyright applies to classical music as much as for everything else. You're free to play, record and distribute copies of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 as the copyright to the composition has expired, but you're not free to redistribute recordings of someone else performing Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 without the explicit permission from the author(s) of that performance.

Sorry but that makes no sense to me. I didn't upload a video with a sound track. I added the sound track with YouTube's tool.

The track I used is from YouTube's library. YouTube knows it because I used it. There should be no confusion about who the performer is and nobody should be able to claim the video.

have you rebutted the claim? and if so what was the response?

also we have a whole other thread on the HN front page about this RN