YouTube’s copyright machine has managed to bonk Nvidia on the head.
A local Italian TV channel has apparently sent a copyright strike to every YouTube video in Italy that uses the DLSS 5 trailer, including Nvidia’s own announcement.
Gaming creator NikTek said on X that the broadcaster used footage from the DLSS 5 trailer in its coverage, then someone at the company carpet-bombed the platform with DMCA complaints.
YouTube’s AI moderation then did what it does best: sweeping first and thinking later, pulling down anything that contains the same clip. The funny bit is that Nvidia, the original source of the trailer, got taken down on the Italian version of YouTube, along with everyone else.
It is easy to blame a sloppy rights team or an overcaffeinated staffer, but the mess points at YouTube’s habit of acting on complaints without bothering to check who owns what. YouTube has been bragging about its automated moderation for ages, and it even has a neat little statement ready to paste.
YouTube said: “In our systems, AI classifiers help detect potentially violative content at scale, and reviewers work to confirm whether content has actually crossed policy lines,” then followed with: “AI is continuously increasing both the speed and accuracy of our content moderation systems.”
Creators are not exactly buying the hype, mostly because the speed and accuracy seem to peak when the platform is deleting the wrong thing. It is estimated that YouTube terminated more than 12 million channels in 2025 for terms-of-service violations, with AI doing most of the flagging.
Some of the creators hit by that wave say the reasons were duff or outright false positives, and the appeals process felt like shouting into the void. Others claim their appeals were rejected within minutes, which does not scream careful human review.
This is not the first time a channel has had an original video taken down after filing a complaint after using it in coverage, but Nvidia is a particularly chunky victim. Plenty of smaller creators using the DLSS 5 clip for reaction content have been clipped, and the strike system is the sort of thing that can wreck a channel even when the uploader did nothing wrong.
Nvidia will probably get YouTube to reinstate its video sooner or later, but the little guys get to enjoy the same automated brick wall and a strike sitting on their account.
