The laws that are in place that result in those enforcements are there to protect and encourage people to continue to make original content as a business. Similar to how patents work. It isn't just "for the sake of it", it is so that 10 years from now we still have people who dedicate their lives to creating great music, games and other media.
It is quite within Youtube's own right to act in response to the pressures applied on them from 3rd parties. You aren't paying for the service and you were never guaranteed anything. It has done an amiable job so far of remaining an honest, up-to-date and largely uncensored service.
Alright that's fine, so the stuff that is still commercially hot should be removed and that's perfectly fine and understandable. What i don't understand is the removal of the god-old content that essentially isn't even on the market anymore. To top that off the original producers are usually gone and this stuff gets removed mysteriously because of third party claims or because it violates some wonky youtube rule (even though there is nothing visibly wrong with the video at all). I'm starting to guess youtube users simply report the videos for whatever stuff they can make up to get it removed, which is more then just likely and would explain the pattern in which these vids are removed. I find it hard to believe a company, making absolutely no money off an old product anymore, would go around trying to knock videos of a product off the face of the earth. I'm talking about games, movies, shows, even some old music, although I understand music is a more touchy issue.
My hypothesis is that it's the youtube users that report the most of these videos out of spite or whatever hatred they have for it (because let's face it, the entire community is composed of gigantic douches). You can see this easily in the way it's done, more popular videos are reported while the less popular ones with essentially the same copyright content go untouched. In contrast when a company takes down vids they clear everything, kind of like a killing spree. They do this periodically too and you see this allot with new shows and songs. Games are rarely taken down, I mean seriously it's a game you physically play and there's only so much a video will give you in terms of a full gameplay experience. Game videos are ideal advertisements, it makes perfect loving sense, yet they get taken down too.
I don't mind Youtube keeping their policy clean but i do mind who they obey to exactly. Although it is a free service, having a video removed and the user that posted it banned because some starfish reported it claiming all kinds of crap on it doesn't seem like a fair policy at all. Maybe if they revised the report system and made it a bit more difficult for someone to report something correctly in order to deter that kind of bullstuff. I'm pretty sure you could flag any video with Copyright infringement as the reason and it would get removed within the week.
