There should be a copyright system that grants copyright only to those individuals who create the thing, not the corporations that published the thing.
I'm sure there's someone who will point out why that is a bad idea, but collective ownership seems like it would be a better way to apply takedown notices more appropriately. A takedown order needs to be voted on by the owners of the thing being potentially infringed upon and if the majority does not think that something violates copyright, then the takedown notice will not be sent.
IANAL but I think some of the problem is people are under the employ of said company when they create said thing and they have contracts that are setup that by default make that the company's IP over the individual.
The length of copyright established by the Founding Fathers was 14 years, plus the ability to renew it one time, for 14 more. 40 years later, the initial term was changed to 28 years.
And now it's 95 years, or the life of the author + 70 years, whichever is shorter. If we went back to the original copyright duration, we probably wouldn't have this issue, especially if the renewal required some proof of need.
I don't think the problem is corporations owning copyright, but how long copyright lasts.
While I don't want the YouTube channel to be shut down, I couldn't imagine that YouTube is the only place this exists and it's the only place it can be hosted.
You'd be surprised to realize what a pain in the ass it is to host a good deal of videos. There's more lost content (shows, movies and commercials) combined than archived data that exists today. Media was simply not kept and storage written over. Sadly, we're going to keep losing it.
I only managed to archive 1758 of the almost 4700 videos after reading this news yesterday. I hope someone else managed to download a bunch before the channel was removed today.
It depends on what you're trying to do. If you want a social media site based around videos with a variety of features with high traffic, then sure. If you're just archiving stuff for the sake of it, then you can simply host static content.
There are also many other places to store stuff than YouTube.