The Department of Transportation rolled out a video as part of its “Golden Age of Travel Starts with You” campaign. It leaned hard into that 1950s/60s nostalgia — when flying was marketed as glamorous, people dressed up, and the whole experience was treated like an event.
And to really hammer home the vibe, the video opened with Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me.”
Then YouTube Pulled It
The video is no longer available on YouTube.
When you try to play it, you get the very un-mysterious message:
Video unavailable. This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by UMPG Publishing.
Here’s The Most Likely Reason
I can’t see YouTube’s internal details, so I don’t know exactly what happened behind the scenes — whether it was automatically detected or manually flagged.
But the most likely explanation is the simplest one: copyrighted music was detected and blocked.
YouTube uses matching systems that compare uploaded audio/video against reference files provided by rightsholders — in this case, UMPG (Universal Music Publishing Group). If there’s a match, the rightsholder can decide what happens next: block the video, monetize it, or track it.
And if you’re using Sinatra to sell a mid-century “golden age” montage, it’s not hard to imagine UMPG having some songs set to auto-block when they show up in uploads — especially in a high-visibility video that sure doesn’t look like it came with a music license.
Bottom line: No matter how much of a vibe you’re going for, you can’t just drop copyrighted music into a video.
Wrap-Up: “Government Video” Doesn’t Mean “Copyright-Free”
Yes, federal government-created content is generally treated differently than privately created content under U.S. copyright rules — but that doesn’t mean the government gets to use someone else’s copyrighted music for free.
Government-made content doesn’t automatically include the rights to any third-party audio used inside it.
So while some might call this YouTube “censoring” the video, it’s much more basic (and much more embarrassing): a copyright owner asserted their rights — and YouTube enforced them.
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