[jpalomaki]

There is nothing new. I suspect the writer of the article did not really study the patent [1]. Reading the summary and part of the text I got quite clear impression that this is ONLY about counting how many times a certain user has shared something prohibited and then blocking users who do that too many times. I don't see this patent having anything to do with actually recognising infringing content.

So I don't see any real invention here. I think the only explanation for patenting this is that if you don't do it, somebody else might and then you may need to fight in court. Since filing patents is cheap (compared to going court over them and on Microsoft scale) it just makes sense to patent everything you can.

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US9614850