My idea of how to fix DMCA on Youtube

My top suggestion would be to get rid of copyright altogether.

A secondary suggestion would be to require anyone submitting DMCA claims to register with a government agency and obtain a license to make such claims. As part of this license, they would agree to forfeit $500 for each claim found to be invalid. A counter-complaint could be filed with this agency, and the penalty would be taken from the claimant’s deposit.

When filing a complaint with YouTube, claimants would need to provide their registered claimant ID, which YouTube could check against the agency’s database to verify good standing. If their deposit is depleted, YouTube would ignore their requests.

At that point, they could still file a non-DMCA copyright claim, but it would not carry the same immediate demands of action as a DMCA claim.

DMCA is too powerful and anyone can make those claims, even frivolously. It's actually supposed to be illegal to make false DMCA claims but apparently enforcement is entirely missing. So this would be a way create some enforcement.

Why I think getting rid of copyright all together is the better option:

IP is not a natural right and we don't have media scarcity now that we've already made so much. We have the ability to share and copy media cheaply. People can and do make media for free all the time. And AI can make infinite content quickly. Media scarcity does not exist.

Copyright at the time it was adopted was a brand new experiment to create an artificial right to resolve the media scarcity issue. Supply and demand don't coordinate in natural media exchange, and so without government intervention commercial exchange of media is abnormal. Of course the founders of the US Constitution where the concept was almost first codified, preceded only for a few years by the French, didn't express it in those terms because the concept of supply and demand hadn't yet developed fully. But without those terms they still had some intuition for what was going on and why production of new creative works was rare.

There are other mechanisms for motivating media production. Hence media did exist before then, and why a lot of media is produced non-commercially today. The ease of making media today and the already surplussed inventory we have makes it so, IMO, we could shift to relying only on those other mechanisms for a bit. We don't even need commercial media. We could certainly have less of it. So maybe you could set copyright to 3 years and still have some commercial media.