This is all much less nefarious than you make it sound.
When a rights-holder finds their IP in a video, they have the option of how to proceed. They can choose to take the video down completely, run ads and receive all or a share of the revenue, etc.
If they choose to leave it up, it's almost always because they are receiving all of the revenue from the video now so they have no reason to take it down. There's no smokey back room deals going on here, this is just the rights enforcement tools provided by YouTube.
Rights-holders do not always hold global rights to content and if the video contains content from multiple rights-holders, there are several competing claims that all need to be resolved.
The reason the videos uploaded by users eventually end up resembling the videos uploaded by the rights-holder is because YouTube provides a mechanism for rights-holders to enforce the same restrictions they operate under on their content even when they weren't the ones to upload it.
Source: I work in a company that does this, though not directly on that side of the business.
It's not a huge leap when you consider it's also been revealed that a good chunk of torrents at one time had been seeded by IPs belonging to corporates.
AFAIK porn performers don't generally get paid residuals, so there probably less interest in this sort of skulduggery.
This is not universally true. For example, you can go on YouTube right now and probably find all sorts of music videos not hosted by the actual artists, so long as it’s older or more obscure music. Plus at this point it’s kind of moot; they already gained their user base from the first several years of illegal new content.
After a Lot of suffering. I believe there was an incident recently in which Pornhub refused to take down videos of a minor in what was an obvious situation of revenge porn.
I think the current model should have been the default from the start - if verified, paid content creators were the only ones allowed, they would get a much bigger share from their videos.
Thank fuck Ryan Creamer was verified.
Yeah, right. Tell that to the flood of channels which will take cut single scenes out of tv series and twitch recordings and upload them to YT monetized.
All of which to say, I expect this to be the same case on PH. There's the usual wackamole game of unauthorized content being taken down, but much of what stays up from unauthorized sources probably does so out of permission that is not apparent on the surface.
I think streaming companies place a premium on the appearance of content coming from users, and this is the result. If I'm right, then changes may not significantly alter the level of traffic to PH, which is what everyone is soothsaying about: that users will just go elsewhere. But I'm curious what's going to happen.
Like you said, PH's model looks to ape youtube's, and the latter does not appear to be entirely reliant on "stolen" content.