Government in YouTube blunder

The UK Cabinet Office has been forced to pull one of the public service videos it published on YouTube due to copyright violation.

A video called Transformational Government can no longer be viewed on the site, instead users get a box of red text stating: "This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner COI Television because its content was used without permission."

COI Television is actually part of the Cabinet Office and the further irony of the video being about transformational government was not lost on one critic.

A spokesman for independent body Public Sector Forums told silicon.com: "The COI is part of the Cabinet Office. So it looks like the Cabinet Office's initiative has fallen at the first hurdle and ironically, it's thanks to a lack of joined-upness between parts of its own ministry."

The embarrassing case of the missing video comes just a week after the Cabinet Office was praised for embracing modern means of communicating through the web.

A Cabinet Office spokeswoman told silicon.com: "We said that this is a small-scale trial or experiment. Trials are meant to flush out a whole range of issues precisely such as these. Rights for online distribution are notoriously complex. We are in discussions to rectify the situation."