Copyright is a very useful thing for companies to have. Having systems in place to prevent copyrighted material from being stolen is GOOD. However, YouTube has a problem with their copyright system. I strongly believe that YouTube needs to assess how their bot system operates. Under the fair use act of 1976, people are allowed to sample copyrighted material so long as you provide criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education or research, essentially, is transformative in nature. There is no reason why a bot should be able to determine whether or not a copyright claim should be forwarded to the claimant of the content. Also, there should be no reason that the claimant can not forewarn the "offender" before a strike is given.

Here is my solution:

•  Hire a team for manual copyright review, there is no reason a multi-billion dollar company can't afford a handful of 60k a year jobs
• If the previous option is "too expensive" revise the bots, they should not be able to determine whether or not a counter claim goes forward to the claimant
• Change the Copyright retraction process, it is extremely peculiar about how the copyright strike is retracted, the specific email that the claim was sent from has to email copyright@youtube.com (More bots in their system) and specify in a specific format why they want to retract their claim. It's a convoluted process and becomes problematic when companies have specific people that send out copyright claims who will never revisit said claim. Not to mention foreign companies may have issues interpreting what YouTube is asking for.
• REQUIRE the claimant to reach out to the "offender" giving them warning to remove the video in x amount of days, or a strike will be given. This completely takes YouTube's hands out of it and would be a smoother process. YouTube will no longer have to worry about their email/bot getting flooded by people sending counter claims, nor will they have to send those copy and pasted emails constantly.
  

Again, there are very simple, common sense ways to make this system work. However, YouTube refuses to acknowledge this, and will not revise their system. Every time I try to submit a counter claim, I get an email back within a few hours from YouTube stating "Our system detected that the following videos you submitted are not eligible for a counter notification." Why is a bot system able to refuse me from contacting the claimant? This needs to change, YouTube used to care about their content creators, but unless you have millions of subscribers, there is no way to possible come close to speaking to a human being at YouTube in regards to copyright. If you use the creator system, you will be speaking to a human, however, you will be sent a link telling you to email copyright@youtube.com which puts you in contact with, you guessed it, the seemingly omniscient bots that somehow are miraculously able to determine what is or is not fair use. Bravo YouTube, you have concocted the "perfect" AI-driven system.

This has been my TED talk, thank you.