I don’t think he expects to recover anything, he just wants to ruin their lives for a few years.
Hell, he could potentially ruin their careers. The ones he's hitting are the bottom barrel of react tubers that'll just walk away from the computer while playing someone else's video, or otherwise not even try to pretend to be transformative. Legal precedent is extremely important when it comes to fair use, since its so open to interpretation. If he takes a win here, he helps draw a legal line that "This is too low effort".
You might think "Well then they'll just have to put in more effort then", but its pretty clear they're only doing this shit in the first place because its easy and low hanging fruit. Even with this bare minimum of engagement, the shit they say already runs them dangerously close to being banned off their platforms for actual legal violations, alongside rampant terms of service violations. If they did somehow gather the individual motivation to actually put in the effort to be appropriately transformative, they'd just be cranking up the same shitty behavior that's already got them walking the line, and it can only be ignored so much. Instead of these streams being 5% absolute retardation, 95% content theft, they might have to go to 30% absolute retardation, 70% content theft, and a six times increase in "I hope all soldiers get PTSD" isn't gonna be something the platforms can just casually brush under the rug the way they try currently. And its a generous assumption that they'll be looking at a linear increase in retardation. In reality, they're gonna have to say new shit and acknowledge stuff with actual responses the way they didn't before, so its more likely to be exponentially retarded.
Used to be that the escape hatch in this kind of situation was to go into journalism when your political bullshit got too hot to handle on normal services, but that ship sunk months ago. Ethan might see a Total Jewish Victory here, can't think of much more jewery than to ruin someone by forcing them to do more work in such a way that they have to put their own ideological gun to their head.
