[1] In February 2007, Stephanie Lenz posted on YouTube a 29-second clip of her 13-month-old son dancing to the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy".

In July 2007, Lenz sued Universal for misrepresentation under the DMCA, and sought a declaration from the court that her use of the copyrighted song was non-infringing.

[3] In September 2007, Prince stated in the media that he intended to "reclaim his art on the internet" and to challenge Lenz's suit.

[2] The district court held that copyright owners must consider fair use before issuing DMCA takedown notices.

Lenz asked: Whether the Ninth Circuit erred in concluding that the affirmation of good faith belief that a given use of material use is not authorized "by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law," required under Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), may be purely subjective and, therefore, that an unreasonable belief—such as a belief formed without consideration of the statutory fair use factors—will not subject the sender of a takedown notice to liability under Section 512(f) of the DMCA?

[11] Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. attracted a fair amount of media attention, as a dispute in which there was no clear winner,[12][13] while a powerful entertainment company may have made absurd claims about the damage caused to its copyrights by a YouTube video in which only a short segment of its song was heard in poor audio quality.

[14][15] Despite the media attention toward the ruling, several legal scholars noted that the ultimate decision did little to clarify how much of a copyrighted work can be copied under fair use for Internet content that causes little financial or reputational harm.