It seems that we’ve reached the breaking point this year as countless numbers of prominent YouTubers such as Angry Joe, I Hate Everything, Casey Neistat, H3H3 Productions, and Philip DeFranco have all come out bashing Google’s business practices.

The current copyright policy on YouTube allows people–really just large corporations–to claim a video and take in all of the ad revenue generated by that video. This is fair based on the premise that the original uploader of the video used content, usually a song or video clip, owned by someone else. By this logic, many copyright claims are definitely fair, as many YouTubers do use content that is not theirs for some of their videos. The problem lies in the fact that someone could use 15 seconds of content that isn’t theirs, and the entity that does own the content can file a copyright claim and take all of the revenue generated by a video.

It gets worse. Content creators have the right to contest any copyright claim that they see to be unfair, however, if the claim is contested and it is still deemed to be fair, the original uploader risks having their channel shut down all together. In case you missed it, this means that YouTube’s copyright policy as it stands now deters content creators–the people who keep the site alive–from challenging the large corporations that are stealing their money.

The obvious solution to this issue is to give the entities that file copyright claims only a portion of the ad revenue generated by the video, relative to the amount of their content in the video. In other words, if 10 seconds of a 100 second video is content that belongs to someone else, than that other person is entitled to 10 percent of the ad revenue generated by that video. It’s also absolutely necessary to stop threatening channels with termination if they challenge a copyright strike and fail to prove that their video falls under fair use.

With Twitch – the largest live streaming site in the world – preparing to add a feature that will let their users upload videos, It’s looking like YouTube will have some more well-needed competition in 2017.  Let’s hope that Google makes some changes to the way they run YouTube in 2017 because if they don’t, it may finally be time for YouTubers to strike back.