It’s also worth noting that this system is rife with abuse, not just from big media companies but also just from trolls exploiting the system. Just in the last month, Walker had a “Phantom of the Opera” parody taken down despite it containing 100 percent original content. It was reinstated after roughly a week, but even this level of disruption is enough to cause problems for creators who promise their viewers a regular schedule.

Me, personally, I deal with the constant threat of deletion the same way I did in 2009; I use a site with less traffic as a backup. In ’09 it was DailyMotion, today it’s Vimeo; I get a tiny fraction of the views there but at least my viewers can watch them somewhere.

It’s also impossible to predict what’s going to get me in trouble and what isn’t. Most of my videos I can upload just fine, even if I don’t make money off of it. But one of my recent videos, a look back at ‘80s one-hit wonder Toni Basil of “Mickey” fame, got insta-blocked; for some reason, whoever owns the rights to the “Mickey” video just does not want it to be viewable anywhere. It’s not even on Toni Basil’s official channel that she runs (although the song without the video is readily available otherwise).

Recently, Vimeo tagged my videos for copyright infringement; fortunately, I was able to dispute it and had it overturned with an hour. This is in marked contrast to YouTube, which is infamously unresponsive to its users. It’s important to note that Vimeo responded to me because I’m their customer (an active Vimeo account costs money). YouTube lets me use their service for free; in fact, for this reason they’re arguably the least culpable for the situation.  YouTube is still basically a start-up; it has yet to make a profit.  It’s not a mystery why YouTube sides with them over its users; Warner Music has lawyers and I have a cheap video camera I got as a Christmas present.  If it doesn’t want to be crushed under the big media companies’ giant corporate thumb, it has to acquiesce to their demands.

If anything, this battle has very little to do with the law and everything to do with leverage: The big media companies use their might to push YouTube into doing what it wants and now some video producers are trying to use whatever clout they have to push it back the other direction.

To be clear, I know the world doesn’t owe me a well-paying career out of making silly internet videos. I know I operate in a grey area, and I know if and when the courts start going through the murky waters of fair use law, they may very well be against me. I’ve heard it argued that WTFU’s definition of fair use is over-expansive and self-serving, and it’s a decent point: Media creators have every right to look out for their own interests and fight piracy, after all, and that includes smaller independent studios just as much as the big guys. Fair use isn’t a right; it’s just a defense. But currently we aren’t even allowed a defense. We just get deleted and that’s that.

That said, there are some steps in the right direction; YouTube announced in November that it was starting a legal fund on behalf of its users. However, it seems likely to be used for only a tiny handful of users, and there has been no other information about the fund since the announcement. I don’t expect it to have much impact on me or my colleagues.

Furthermore, it’s not going to affect anything when copyright holders can issue wave after wave of takedown notices, in bad faith, without consequence. There is currently no punishment for abusing the system like this, and until there is, the situation isn’t going to change. And it’s not going to work in copyright holders’ favor either: Whatever model of consumption they expect the Internet to conform to… it clearly isn’t working.

And it doesn’t fit at all with how people consume content today. The media landscape is now a culture of remixes and mashups. Some of the most popular YouTube channels (such as CinemaSins, Honest Trailers or any numbers of cover artists and video game channels) rely on other people’s original content. “Legitimate” websites like Sports Illustrated and Vox Media embed blatantly copyright-infringing YouTube clips of FIFA or John Oliver right on their websites. These are sites that produce their own copyrighted content, mind you, and they participate in the new YouTube-based culture just as much as me, a nobody with a webcam. (And I’m at least transforming other people’s content into something original-ish.)

I don’t know what the solution to this is. YouTube wants to be a legitimate service, and becoming an unmoderated hub for piracy would destroy that goal, even without the specter of lawsuits. I just know that the current system isn’t working. It’s too prone to abuse; an automated algorithm can’t operate in good faith. I do believe that eventually everything will stabilize into a paradigm acceptable to all, but the current struggle is nowhere near its endgame.