The alternate timeline where youTube focused on "leanbacks" and methods to have better attribution for content and ways to ethically facilitate content such as "watch videos"

There is value added by commentary, it ought to be possible for such content to be created all benefit.

youTube never cared about this, they are fine with stealing unless you steal from people with expensive lawyers, in that case they instantly take the side of the expensive lawyers and "fair use" be dammed.

We have the worst of all possible outcomes. Creation rights are abused and defended with zeal to the point that people avoid making possible excellent content (ask any music educator how they feel about making content for youTube, they get dinged for humming tunes)

Meanwhile these rules don't serve the function of protecting small creators who get their stuff stolen relentlessly. It's very bad.

Maybe when youTube becomes unusable, which it will some day, we can do better.

Some context: "leanbacks" were a short lived youTube format where you could create a playlist of other people's videos and intersperse your own short videos between them. YouTube facilitated this by making the whole thing play like one long video. The views of the clips you showed went to the people who posted those videos!

But, they discontinued it for some reason and of course now they are all just scattered heaps of videos that make no sense.

But for a moment I thought it could work.