There was a domino effect. My counter-claim was one of the first. It was joined by some other counter-claims, all against the same entity, ARC. There were other complaints made outside of the DMCA counter-claim system about ARC. YouTube's appropriate department eventually received enough of these to get suspicious about ARC, and found that they didn't exist. YouTube then reversed themselves on all claims made by ARC, then found the claims made by the other false claimants and reversed them as well.

If I had done this in isolation, yeah, it would have meant that one video went back up. But there are these things called message boards. I was keeping other Anons appraised in real-time (as much as possible, without blowing the nature of the honeypot) about what I was doing and how I was doing it, including posting copies of the text of the counter-claim so that they could use it. Other Anons used the information that I posted to initiate further action. There was also a first-guy-in-the-pool thing going on. Someone had to jump in first to prove the water was fine.

Also, Anons and critics were attacking from a number of directions. There were e-mails and phone calls being made to YouTube in an effort to prevent Anons being named, which caused YouTube some suspicions. The DMCA counter-claims were Anon's most powerful weapon, but they could only be filed by Anons whose identities were already compromised in order to minimize risk.