The crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 earlier this month made TV news broadcasts all over the world. A news anchor at one station—KTVU in Oakland, California—had an anchor read out the "confirmed" names of the pilots. Unfortunately, this was actually a racially tinged joke. The pilots' names were "Ho Lee Fuk," "We Tu Lo," "Sum Ting Wong," and "Bang Ding Ow," viewers were told.

The fall guy for all of this has been the unnamed summer intern at the National Transportation Safety Board who "confirmed" the names. He or she has since been fired, and the station apologized. Asiana actually threatened to sue for defamation—apparently because, as Stephen Colbert noted, the racist joke was threatening to Asiana's "sterling reputation as a world leader in almost landing planes." (Colbert also suggested other names with the "right ethnicity," like "Captain Park Ma Plen Tu-Sun.")

Of course, KTVU wasn't going to get off that easily. The episode was caught for posterity on YouTube.

But KTVU then went ahead and used—what else?—copyright law to expunge its embarrassing reporting on this episode. The station issued takedown notices on all the YouTube videos that recorded its snafu, and those videos went down, as was reported in Mother Jones and several TV blogs.

At first KTVU actually tried to defend its actions by saying it was trying to avoid offending the Asian community. “The accidental mistake we made was insensitive and offensive," the station's manager told TVSpy. "By now, most people have seen it. At this point, continuing to show the video is also insensitive and offensive, especially to the many in our Asian community who were offended. Consistent with our apology, we are carrying through on our responsibility to minimize the thoughtless repetition of the video by others.”

Of course, the cover-up is always worse than the crime. The takedowns caused KTVU's actions to quickly become news at Mother Jones, Wired, Techdirt, Gawker—the list goes on.

The takedowns weren't able to last long, and the videos are back up. A search for "KTVU Asiana" shows a bunch of videos, including the one embedded by TVSpy with more than 10,000,000 views.

It took less than a day for KTVU to give up on its misguided (and probably futile) campaign to erase Web criticism. Still, the episode is one more example of how using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to erase embarrassing behavior is far too easy. Parody and criticism are legally defensible reasons to make copies. Sometimes kicking off a political discussion about a TV newscast needs to begin with making a reproduction of that newscast. Lawyers shouldn't be required.