Why the distinction exists
A copyright removal request is a statement made by a specific person about a specific right. Section 512 requires the notification to be signed by a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is allegedly infringed — which means the process has to know, at the moment of filing, who owns the right and who is speaking for them.
YouTube accepts requests from copyright owners and from authorized representatives acting for them. Three roles are involved, and a notice has to keep them distinct.
The three roles
Copyright owner
The holder of the exclusive right at issue. Under §106 those rights — reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, preparation of derivative works — can be held separately and licensed separately. Owning one does not mean owning all of them.
Authorized representative
A person or organization the owner has authorized to act on their behalf. The representative does not acquire the copyright. They acquire permission to make a specific kind of statement about it, within a defined scope.
Signatory
The individual person whose signature appears on the notification. A signatory is always a person, never an organization: YouTube asks for the signer’s full legal name, a first and last name rather than a company name.
What written authorization has to cover
Authorization that only says you may act for me is a thin basis for the statements a notification carries. Before we accept a matter, the scope has to be legible on four points:
Which works
Named works, or a defined and checkable category — not an open-ended grant covering anything the representative later decides to report.
Which rights
The exclusive right actually at issue. An exclusive licensee of one right cannot make statements about another.
Which actions
Submitting removal requests is one action. Withdrawing them, responding to a counter notification, and negotiating a licence are different ones, and they are not implied by the first.
For how long
Authorization with no end date is difficult to rely on months later, when the person who granted it may no longer hold the right.
Two claims a representative must not make
Ownership. A representative acting for an owner does not own the work. A notice that presents the representative as the owner misstates element 6 of the notification, which is the element carrying the penalty-of-perjury statement.
Channel-wide rights. Documented rights in specific works do not establish rights in everything an account has published. Reporting an entire channel on the strength of evidence covering three videos is a scope failure, whoever files it — and YouTube states that a removal request cannot cover an entire channel or playlist in any case.
We act only as an authorized representative, never as the owner, and the current signatory is published rather than left implicit — a reviewer can check who signed a filing without asking us. Where authorization is unclear in scope, we treat the matter as unclear in scope: it is declined or referred back to the owner rather than narrowed by assumption on our side.