The online battles for president

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John McCain's campaign adverts posted on YouTube include several excerpts of footage from TV broadcasts.

US presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain continue to pave new trails as they use online media in their campaigns.

Senator Obama has become the first presidential candidate to advertise in video games.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign has complained to YouTube that it unfairly removed campaign videos that feature copyrighted content.

YouTube responded that the campaign can appeal the removals.

Game on

Tapping into an increasingly popular advertising medium, Senator Obama's campaign has paid for advertising in 18 video games, including Guitar Hero, Burnout Paradise and Madden 09.

Control of such ads is maintained by the games makers, who can modify ads when games consoles log on to the internet. The Obama ads were added early this month and will continue up until the election.

The ads promote an early voting site set up by the Obama campaign

The ads will be seen only by players in 10 US states that allow voting before the November 4 deadline, and include a number of swing states such as Ohio and Florida.

They are designed to draw attention to a website the campaign has made to encourage early voting.

"It reaches an audience that is typically young males, roughly 18 to 34," said Holly Rockwood, a spokeswoman for Electronic Arts, which is featuring the ad in nine of its games.

"Like most television, radio and print outlets, we accept advertising from credible political candidates. These ads do not reflect the political policies of EA or the opinions of its development teams," she said.

YouTube controversy

A letter from the McCain campaign to YouTube outlines the "overreaching copyright claims" under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) that have led to the "unfortunate and unnecessary" removal of several campaign-related videos from the site.

The videos featured short segments of video from news broadcasts, which brings them under copyright. When takedown notices were presented by various news organisations to YouTube, the videos were removed.

The McCain campaign argues that the videos constitute "examples of fair use", protected by the DMCA, and that "nothing in the DMCA requires a host like YouTube to comply automatonically with takedown notices, while blinding itself to their legal merit."

YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine replied in a letter to the McCain campaign that YouTube is "merely an intermediary in this exchange" of user-uploaded content and "performing a substantive legal review of every DMCA notice we receive prior to processing a takedown...is not a viable solution."