The problem is, one man's "fair" might be another man's "foul."

Copyright holders are faced with negotiating the realities of digital content. They find themselves having to live with a looser interpretation of how their content is used, or "sampled" even, especially in the face of a shifting public perception about what is OK to use fairly and what should be paid for, or licensed, in the intellectual property realm.

But, as Google spokesperson Ricardo Reyes noted, the DMCA is the "millennium," not "decade," copyright act. Having said that, YouTube abides by the DMCA by honoring any request to remove content, he added.

But, he said, Google cannot police the content before it's posted. "The user-generated [material] is still the most popular."