Sure. But there's a fair amount of US Copyright law that says this has never been the case. To test this hypothesis, upload a video to YouTube with music by Prince playing in the background.
Copyright law is more of an ideal, and if it had "never been the case", there wouldn't have been any content to DMCA off of YouTube in the first place. US copyright law is fighting the tide, not conveying a natural order.
I think you might be the only one in this conversation setting up the strawman that copyright law is not natural law.
You characterizing it as a strawman with no real rebuttal is pretty strawman-ish yourself.