Because filing that counter-notice requires you to provide personal information, in case the person who filed the original DMCA wants to serve you with a legal notice.

From https://www.copyright.gov/512/:

> [...] To be effective, a counter-notice must contain substantially the following information:

> (iv) the user’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.

It'd be interesting if someone set up a series LLC that would stand in for the original user by assignment, fund legal defense as much as the original user is willing to, and would just declare insolvency in the event of a bad judgement.

Sure, but the LLC wouldn't need to know the meatspace identity of the user. And for the LLC management it would be a bona fide arms length business. So the troll would be stuck doing discovery on the online account, which if things were setup correctly (likely for the situations where having to dox yourself is problematic), it wouldn't lead back to the user either.

There's two possible cases:

1. multiple creators assign their works to one LLC. This would probably avoid the piercing the corporate veil problem, but it would be a pretty juicy target for litigators. If they successfully win the lawsuit, they can potentially seize all works that were assigned to it, and take them down or resell them. If this happens to a video you spent weeks working on, I think I'll be pretty pissed.

2. each video/creator assign their works to one LLC. This would avoid the "juicy target" issue described above, but you'll have to be super careful to avoid piercing the corporate veil .

I'm arguing that (2) should be fine. Piercing the veil is only a concern if the managers/owners of the overarching LLC could be found liable. But this would be a bona fide business for them, so why should they? Piercing the veil of an individual series to go after the original uploader would be a definite possibility, but the whole point of this setup is for the original uploader to not have have to dox themselves to file a counterclaim.

Pooling like (1) might be an interesting approach to strengthen things further. You don't need to own a copyright to defend against a copyright claim, so the work merely needs to be licensed to the LLC series. A nontransferrable license to upload a work to a web host has little commercial value. In the worst case, a successful claimant would get the ability to contact webhosts to seize control of other accounts it then owns, and the ability to disrupt defense of other claims by seizing incoming funding. But given how useless such results would be, would it even be worth it for a troll to press that far?

You could add additional interested parties into the mix by playing the public good angle. Donate to this foundation to protect user generated content against SLAPPs, etc.

> (I don't know why nobody ever does this)

Even if your use is obviously and unambiguously fair use, the legal fees to defend yourself will range at least in the $10,000-100,000 range. (And many fair use cases aren't actually all that obvious, sadly).

We need something like anti-SLAPP for fair use, where someone with an obvious fair use defense gets to have the malicious accuser pay their legal fees for them.

Realistically most of these trolls will not sue you. And in the rare case that they do sue you, they'll drop the lawsuit if they see you have a real lawyer. It's all scare tactics.

Exactly. This goes also for legitimate copyright owners if there's a good case for fair-use. Content-ID claims (or DMCA notices) are free, so they just send them out with little review. But they are sure to take a second look before committing to a $10k-100k court battle. They have much more resources than you, but their resources are still limited and better spent on cases that are clear cut, or on sending more DMCA notices.

Sounds like a great business model if you could pay a lawyer to keep the trolls at bay.

Sorry, but it's not as if a Content ID claim is the end of the road.

You can appeal a Content ID claim. If your appeal is rejected, you can even appeal that — which forces the claimant to either issue a DMCA takedown or concede. During the pendency of the dispute process all ad revenue is held in escrow for whomever 'wins' in the end.

It's a great system, and I say that a full-time producer of content for YouTube.

Also with a DMCA you can only take a video down, not take the ads-money instead. Content-ID creates very bad incentives.

ContentID does the same thing and then falls back to the DMCA process if you and the copyright owner can't agree. It's more steps I guess but not all that different.