I would also add that google very much understands the implications of streaming music.

This is speculated to be why you can't get Youtube Premium without Youtube Music (in most countries?). Because all the license holders would lose their minds if they weren't getting a cut (and apparently the ad revenue from music videos isn't enough).

That's the thing that drives me fucking nuts. Use 10 seconds of a song in your 10 minute video, and they get all the money for your work. They should get whatever the percent of your video is that their song occupies at best. If you're talking/acting over top of their music, then you're splitting that percentage in half.

I don't know if they're still there but it used to be if you looked at the description of any officially uploaded music on youtube, there'd be a laundry list of music rights groups for like a dozen countries/areas

Google doesn't just get blanket rights to stream a song, they have to license the rights to play that particular song separately for each individual country where they want to stream it

His logic chain may have been flawed for his argument, but his premise is not wrong. YouTube providing a distribution platform for any type of music video means that content holders are putting music on there and suffering the same rules as anyone else. To the best of my knowledge, Google does not pay any additional license fees to content owners should they elect to upload a music video to the platform. The owner makes ad revenue just like all other creators. This effectively circumvents the costly licensing agreements that the likes of Spotify and Pandora have to enter into.

With the SD what you're talking about is reality but I meant it in terms of normies perceptions. I watched some retro handheld reviews on YouTube and it started surfacing videos about SD cards of retro roms you can buy. There's always people pointing out that you can just download the same rompack from archive.org, and there are people replying who say that's piracy. I couldn't make something like that up if I tried. Here's another one specifically about YouTube. If you torrent a song, that's bad. But if you use a YouTube to mp3 website that's different. My family sees it that way.

Tbf Walt Disney himself invented the sound of a dick slapping an ankle

I worked for one of the YouTube founders once, killed me when he explained how they benchmarked all the Copyright detection software available at the time and then picked the worst one to use for their licensing system.

Not sure, but I think its purpose is to get get these posts appear in meta search engine results (SEO).

Probably, but at least with genres like vocaloid, you'll find plenty of people taking songs/videos from sites like Bilibili or Niconico and they'll either just straight up upload the video or will instead just slap on subtitles and upload without consent. There's also a similar phenomenon with anime music as well, but that's usually for just the music.

There are a ton that have weird fucking usernames. I was confused at first why my Bluetooth was showing BobByJimSmith4345 as the "artist" after telling it to play a song, but yeah they'll pretty much just look whatever up by name from YouTube and play it.

No, certainly not most. Some, for sure, but tons of albums are uploaded by some random dude.

And many non-official uploads are let stay because somebody sent them a dmca and they chose to keep the video up but let monetization pay out to the org that copyright claimed the content. So the ancient "song name (hd)" video from cheeselicker9000 isn't official but the record label likely gets paid for any ad revenue they make from it. Most labels just strike the non official stuff and upload their own nowadays though. I know when I did some youtube that was one of the options for a response, just letting the claimant take ad revenue and manage monetization.

Downloading from youtube is piracy? How? If it was like a Youtube Red show, sure, but the normal videos everyone can see for free?

For me piracy begins with aquiring things or features which usually cost money to get whilst also taking into account if its obvious a thing should cost money in such an environment (thats also how our piracy laws are worded here).

So our piracy laws also classify things as piracy if it was obvious the deal was too good to be true like Windows for 2$ on eBay or chinese ROM cards for 5$ with hundreds of games.

Videos on youtube, including music, are a normal occurrence. A full blockbuster movie is usually not.

They have to pay for anything official.

The rest is the "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA. Effectively, sites aren't liable for user generated content if they respond to official DMCA takedown requests in a timely manner. YouTube also goes beyond that to directly work with copyright holders to preemptively remove infringing content with content ID, which scans everything for violations, and their own tools to report infringement. They don't need to do that for the DMCA protection, but it's probably cheaper at their obscenely large scale.

And if not, how has Youtube not been cease and desisted/sued into absolute oblivion?

Because YouTube is owned by a trillion dollar conglomerate.

Who cares

Me. We have a living breathing example of why public file sharing is a good thing that exposes music to new audiences and I want people to recognize that.

i guess you also have a different job that you rely on for food and shelter?