U.S. Air Force v. Wired/Threat Level

On March 5, 2008, a lawyer for the U.S. Air Force sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, requesting that it remove a thirty-second Air Force promotional video posted to the site by Wired's Kevin Poulsen in connection with a February 27, 2008 article. The article described the Air Force's new recruitment drive as embodied in the promotional video:

The Air Force is going large with a new tech-themed recruitment drive sporting the tagline: "A Changing World." In this 30-second TV spot, cool headed airmen in the service's fledgling Cyber Command are seen combating one of the "three million" hacker attacks that target the Pentagon building every day.

YouTube removed the clip in response to the notice. According to Poulsen's post about the takedown, the Air Force originally sent the clip to him and thanked him for agreeing to run it. Wired is now hosting a copy of the video clip on its own servers.

The takedown notice is interesting given that U.S. government works generally are not copyrightable, but an indepdendent contractor may have created the promotional video and assigned its right to the government. How the law applies in those circumstances is less clear.