There's some inside baseball here that GN probably hasn't picked up on.
Some smaller law firms have pivoted to providing algorithmic DMCA takedown services. The idea: big companies pay those firms either a flat fee or some sort of per-takedown rate for issuing DMCA takedowns for online uses of their content, and the firms use algorithmic methods (and, often, third party vendors, often
third world third parties) to catch purportedly infringing content and toss DMCA requests out on behalf of their client. This leaves in-house counsel free to do other stuff while pretending to be tough on IP infringement, helps "monetize" their copyright portfolio, and gives smaller firms a nice drip feed of regular cash. Even outside of the DMCA,
Getty Images used to do this back in the 2010s with their image portfolio: they had a bot crawl around, find any thumbnails/reproductions on any website, and blasted off monetary demands from their pet law firm without so much as a second review.
The fact that Bloomberg is using a generic Gmail address for their DMCA takedowns indicates that it's almost certainly an inbox managed by some external paralegal from some non-Bloomberg vendor. Chances are, Bloomberg has recently realized that their news wing is already wildly unprofitable and incompetent and has begun attempts at monetizing their content (and shutting down those nasty kids on YouTube that outperform them by leaps and bounds) by aggressively enforcing via the external help described above. Might be a new thing, which is why GN didn't see similar takedowns before. That's also why the lawyers at Bloomberg got so pissed when GN tried calling them directly: from their perspective, the whole DMCA issue is some complex copyright lawyer nonsense they paid someone else to deal with, and they'd rather be dealing with generic corporate in-house crap like dealing with their weekly sexual harassment allegations or deciding what asinine AI startup to buy.
Bloomberg would be absolute idiots to actually bring suit here, but it's not impossible. GN could easily wield cases like
SOFA v. Dodger like a shield. And, even if those cases didn't exist, their case
could become new fair use precedent (such as for the idea that reproducing copyrighted recordings of public officials conducting their public duties is fair use on public policy grounds, particularly when those reproductions are for the purpose of proving what those public officials said), which would cause all forms of trouble for legacy news media. Problem is, the external vendor Bloomberg hired might also be empowered to file complaints on their behalf by default when channels file DMCA counter-notifications. It's very possible that a real adult (that is, a lawyer with a head on their shoulders thinking the issues through and not some idiot operating on autopilot looking for billable hours) wouldn't enter the proverbial room until long after the complaint was filed, which would mean that GN would have to scramble around dealing with the complaint for quite some time.
That said, if I was GN, I'd be excited to get sued for this. Talk about a good opportunity for some fun press, and an opportunity to get a bunch of tech nerds invested in distributing their video. Sucks to lose the YouTube views/revenue, but it might be a pretty interesting opportunity for them nonetheless.
