Re:Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
by slothtrop on Monday December 14, 2020 @01:57PM
(#25421589)
There are account penalization i.e. a strike system associated with frequent infringement complaints, and it doesn't take many. While it's certainly the case that copyright holders will simply take over the revenue from unauthorized videos, my expectation is that most of these uploaders are not unwitting anonymous types: they actually represent the company. I had read an article years ago detailing that this can be the case but I can't be arsed to find it right now.
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.
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.