YouTube gave GameChops 24 hours to dispute 100 DMCA notices on its 600,000-subscriber channel

Counter notifications get filed one video at a time. Cutman said he had 24 hours to dispute more than 100 notices ^[5], and YouTube describes a counter notification as a legal request to restore material removed through mistake or misidentification ^[7]. That leaves roughly 14 minutes per notice with no sleep ^[20]. Each one needs somebody to pull the license for that release and decide whether it matches the file that went up.

YouTube terminates channels with three active strikes ^[6]. The GameChops dashboard showed 26 ^[4], more than eight times the threshold ^[21]. Winning most of the disputes does not clear it: 24 of the 26 have to come off to leave the channel sitting at two ^[22].

Materia Music's September 14 statement is specific about categories. It alleges GameChops lacked mechanical licenses for some covers and the separate permissions that remixes, samples and derivative works require, and says it tried to resolve the matter privately for more than a year ^[10]. Cutman said the label obtains its cover licenses through DistroKid, and showed a list he said covered the Undertale and Deltarune releases ^[12]. DistroKid's own licensing documentation, as described by Dexerto, draws the line in the same place Materia does: a standard cover license applies when an artist re-records a song without fundamentally changing it, and does not extend to remixes, mashups or samples ^[13]. GameChops disputes the suggestion that its releases were improperly licensed ^[11].

Cutman also argued the videos had already been subject to YouTube revenue-sharing claims, so rights holders were receiving money from them ^[16]. Payment and permission are separate questions, and Materia's allegation goes to permission ^[10][13].

The wave hit around 50 artists at once, by Cutman's account, and he said he had never received a strike before an issue involving a Deltarune piano album roughly a year ago ^[14]. Among the removals he listed were Holder's Spider Dance, Arceon's Hopes and Dreams, and his own K/DA Megalovania mashup, which he said Riot Games had previously approved ^[15]. "My concern is that if GameChops goes down, who's next?" he said ^[19].

For anyone holding a catalogue of covers and remixes ^[2], the sort has two axes. One is license type against work type: a re-recording covered by a standard cover license, or an adaptation that needs separate permission from the rights holder. The other is retrieval time, meaning whether you can produce the document for a specific asset inside a day without emailing your distributor. Only one box out of four survives a batch of a hundred notices: matched license, same-day retrieval. A correct license nobody can produce inside the window does not help, because YouTube sets the deadline. GameChops has until Monday, September 21 ^[8].