If people uploads heaps of vintage (80s, 70s,90s) commercials into YouTube publicly, does that mean they own copyright or is it public domain automatically?

Question

What makes it okay for them to upload it without the original owners of them to not complain about them being uploaded?

In: Other

Answer 1

The reason YouTube hasn’t been sued out of existence yet is because they have a good system for the copyright holders. Copyrighted works in their database can be automatically detected by content ID or manually claimed by the copyright owner. The copyright owner can then choose to automatically remove the video or receive some/all of the ad revenue from the video.

So copyrighted content on YouTube is only there because the copyright owner uploaded it themselves, is taking the ad revenue, doesn’t know it’s there, or can’t be bothered.