Just another of the myriad examples of how the DMCA is abused with no repercussions to the abusers at all.
Remember when Youtube removed a video of someone in their garden with the rationale that the sounds of birds chirping infringed on some company's copyright [1]? And then they upheld the removal even following manual review, so the tired refrain that it was just an automated bot was not even applicable.
I am amazed I am going to say this, but the issue is not with the DMCA but with Google/YouTube allowing a bypass of DMCA.
If you read carefully, you will see they refer in the cited case to the Content Id system. In that case Google allows the claimants to verify that it is indeed their content and takes their word for it with no repercussions.
If the company above had made a false DMCA claim they would be in rough water, as DMCA provides the tooling for damages etc and "countersueing."
Essentially Google found a way to produce something worse than DMCA in all aspects besides automation and angering their product (that is the users and content creators).
I think what you say is technically true (technically speaking in the cited case the issue is indeed with the Content ID system), but the broader issue is absolutely with the DMCA because the whole reason Google/Youtube implemented Content ID is to cut down on the number of actual DMCA requests they receive. In other words, without DMCA there would very likely be no Content ID.
Bypassing the DMCA doesn’t make life harder for owners of publishing rights. It makes life easier and I assume is a consequence of a negotiation with major publishers.
Remember when Youtube removed a video of someone in their garden with the rationale that the sounds of birds chirping infringed on some company's copyright [1]? And then they upheld the removal even following manual review, so the tired refrain that it was just an automated bot was not even applicable.
[1] https://waxy.org/2012/03/youtube_bypasses_the_dmca/