Wow, that is just pure evil! They're making a total mockery of the copyright system and I'm relishing the idea of someone exposing them for who they are. If they don't resolve this reasonably, would you consider taking them to court? Is it financially feasible?
You're allowed to copyright a recording of wind, just like you're allowed to copyright a photograph of a lake. The dumb part was putting into Youtube's system to look for similar ones.
What if we float the possibility that it's not evil, but just incompetent and lazy? It seems pretty likely that they learned they could upload all their content in order to protect it and then did so without any input from someone who knows anything about the fingerprinting algorithms and where they were likely to fail.
It seems that the fault rests squarely on YouTube for not getting this right.
