Busted! All your work is gone. Your voice silenced.

Do you slink back behind your laptop and hope that the media giant doesn't sue you? Do you create a new account under a new name and keep plugging away until you're busted again?

Not if you're Allen Asch, the Sacramento, Calif., man who goes by the YouTube sobriquet "LiberalViewer." When all his work was expunged in February, he felt unfairly used in a legal tug of war between Viacom and Google, owner of YouTube.

So what to do?

He studied the "fair use" doctrine of the copyright laws and fought to get the videos reinstated. Fair use is an exception to the law that allows people to use copyrighted material for commentary, parody, news reporting and educational research.

But one man - even if he has a law degree, as Asch does - has neither the means nor the time to fight a major corporation over the vagaries of copyright law.

It took two lawyers from the ACLU writing several pointed letters over several months, as well as a couple of phone calls from lawyers at the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School, to persuade Viacom and YouTube to cease and desist from its cease and desist notice and return Asch's work to the site.

Though grateful that he is allowed to continue to work clips from favorites such as "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" into his videos, Asch still feels as though he's been put through the corporate wringer.

"In a way," Asch says, "I felt like (Viacom) should apologize to me."

Not that he's holding his breath for that to happen.

But Asch is speaking out to inform other bloggers and purveyors of consumer-generated media that they have just as much right to hold the fair-use banner as journalists in traditional media (newspapers, television, radio) and scholars.

"One of the good things that's come of this is that Viacom now has made a statement saying it will allow more (fair use) than before," Asch says. "It's going to err on the side of tolerance. In fact, I want to make a video about this to let people know they won't get sued."

The use of photographs, video clips and music samples on blogs and Web sites has become so popular - and the legal blow-back by copyright owners so prevalent - that several legal organizations have formed to aid people in determining what constitutes fair use of material.

The highest profile is Stanford's Fair Use Project, which in the past year has won several major legal victories for Internet users, academic researchers and documentary filmmakers against copyright claims.

It has helped on copyright claims from the serious to the silly. Due to the Fair Use Project's intervention, a Stanford scholar gained the right to quote from primary source documents from the estate of writer James Joyce. A video parodist was able to use Gloria Gaynor's song "I Will Survive" without having to gain permission from the song's owner, Universal Music Group.