Massive You Tube Takedown is Typical Scientology Censorship

The Church of Scientology has been in a losing battle with the Internet for nearly two decades, ever since the first critics started revealing the sordid details of the organization on Usenet newsgroups. However, the rate of Scientology’s defeat has accelerated dramatically since January 2008, with the arrival of the Anti-Scientology group, “Anonymous”.
The church of scientology had to act against this decimation and, over a period of twelve hours between this Thursday night and Friday morning, the church set up a fictional company called the “American Rights Counsel LLC” and used it - and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) - to send out over 4,000 false DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, all making copyright infringement claims against videos with content critical of the Church of Scientology.
Because of YouTube's automated system to respond to such complaints, all those videos, which included channels like Mark Bunker's XenuTV and a portion of Tory Christman’s ToryMagoo44 channel were pulled from the site.
However, Counter-claims were immediately filed and YouTube has reposted the 4,000 anti-Scientology videos and has reinstated the suspended YouTube accounts.
Although the American Rights Counsel had no copyright claim on the videos - and the company doesn’t even exist – and the church of scientology filing 4,000 false DMCA notices is a criminal offense, the DMCA rarely prosecute in these cases.
So, what can YouTube do to stop this abuse in the future?
Unfortunately, company's hands are largely tied — there is no provision in the DMCA that allows YOU TUBE and other sites to confirm the provenance of claims.
Issuers of bogus takedown notices can only be held accountable after the fact in court.