Technology

I think you are missing hundreds of years of progressive corporate lawyering to entrench their business model(s) into our society.

Take the US for example. Originally corporations had to be for the public good, were time limited, and the owners were held directly financially accountable for their decisions.

It took hundreds of years of court cases and lobbying to get to the point where we are now and it is absolutely insane. There is a reason the corporation has become the dominant form of our culture.

The lawyers always win

Not always

Steven Robert Donziger (born September 14, 1961) is an American former attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc. and other cases in which he represented over 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador. The Ecuadorian court awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 billion ($13 billion in 2024 dollars) in damages, which led Chevron to withdraw its assets from Ecuador and launch legal action against Donziger in the US. In 2011, Chevron filed a RICO (anti-corruption) suit against Donziger in New York City. The case was heard by US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who determined that the ruling of the Ecuadorian court could not be enforced in the US because it was procured by fraud, bribery, and racketeering activities. As a result of this case, Donziger was disbarred from practicing law in New York in 2018.

Donziger was placed under house arrest in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan's RICO decision, when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron's forensics experts. In July 2021, US District Judge Loretta Preska found him guilty, and Donziger was sentenced to 6 months in jail in October 2021. While Donziger was under house arrest in 2020, twenty-nine Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as "judicial harassment." Human rights campaigners called Chevron's actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). In April 2021, six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Donziger's case. In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that the pre-trial detention imposed on Donziger was illegal and called for his release. Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Donziger was released on April 25, 2022

They are just making it up. It's just nonsense.

These copyright claims are governed by the DMCA in the US. Platforms like Youtube that allow User Generated Content have a safe harbor provision. They are usually not liable for content that users post. Without that, the internet as we know it would be hard to imagine. But when someone reports a copyright violation, the platform must take it down, or else becomes liable. Then it could be sued for damages, as if the platform had pirated the content.

Posters can submit a DMCA counter-notice. At that point, the copyright owner must either sue the poster, or the content goes back up (within 14 days). It is quite suspicious, that there is no mention of that in the OP.

However, copyright owners have sued Youtube, alleging that they did not do enough to take down pirated content. This did not go so well for Youtube. Eventually they were forced to create "Content ID". Owners register and upload their content. Youtube continuously scans for that content in videos posted by users. What happens when there is a match depends on the assumed owner. They can choose to have it taken down, or to get the ad money, for example. SNAFUs are pretty common, especially with classical music. It also has no regard for Fair Use, but content owners hate that anyway.