Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

Check out Peroscope films.

They take public domain footage, mostly us government stuff, and release it and claim copyright over it.

I took some of their public domain footage and put it on YouTube and they freaked out.

Through logic and reason I was able to get them to admit they have no copyright right, as they were initially claiming.

But they did have the YouTube terms of service.

So, back to this.

If they had public domain stuff they wanted to protect, this is another less obvious way to do it.

That's interesting, how did you find these guys?

They found me. I found public domain old black and white military training videos on a public resource on the internet and put them in YouTube. Then they did the YouTube strike thing and I called them and the guy was a total jerk on the phone. Like Jerry McGuire or that other guy Tom Cruise played in Tropic Thunder.

They put a strike on you because they had the film themselves and were claiming copyright?

Were you putting up those films just as a public good service or was it for something else?

I was putting them up in good faith as a public service.

Yes, they did. But when I pointed out that they didn't in fact own the copyright they highlighted this detail about the youtube terms if service, so I still had to take the video down, not because it violated copyright, but because it violated the YouTube terms of service.

Which part of the Youtube terms of service did it violate?

I dont know, here is their contact info:

https://stock.periscopefilm.com/contact-stock/

As I said, super unpleasant folks.

Youtube enforces its own terms of service, not them. They just bullied you into removing the content so they can keep their ad revenue from the views without having to compete with you.

Sounds about right. They flagged it via the youtube process so I don't even know how I would dispute that with them.