Sadly, this actually has less to do with law and more to do with legal proceedure. (My apologies, I've just woken up after a late night coding.)
(There's a slight definition difference between the two. What is legal and what is right are often two seperate things.)
For most part... I'll give the short 'Take it or leave it' and a longer analytical answer. You won't like either.
Short answer - Columbia has very company friendly IP laws, and someone in the country petitioned the government to create a takedown notice. Youtube by its international operations is obliged to comply or else lose safe harbour IN the United States.
Take it or leave it, basically, and Youtube sort of like staying in business worldwide, so tend to roll over more than it should.
Longer Answer:
Youtube (from memory) have international juristiction requirements - it has to comply with the various international requests and laws. It doesn't deny governments either, based under the laws they're in (They're legally required to do so by the Bourne Convention and others to comply with their laws). There's also other requirements put in place.
The Bourne Convention (among other conventions including the one negociated right now, I forget the name) specifies that if a signatory country with stricter laws files a proceedure to take down, that any other signatory must comply. As you can guess IP owners want this to be so strict that you can't even back up something you own. On a unrelated note, please pay attention if you see copyright related news, and uh, try to stop it. It does matter, you know.
There was an amusing case where I had to sit on a story (it never got reported, because the Anime News Network declined to run the story) where we discovered that the world 'Cosplay' was in fact coprighted by a Singapore Cosplay Club.
Not such a big deal until you found out that it was, in fact, possible to export that copyright out of Singapore to say Japan, or the United States. (The period they're permitted to has now passed, which is why I'm fine talking about it. In 2007, if we reported the odd fact, it might have given the owners some interesting ideas...)
So don't dismiss this sort of tactic out of hand. I've seen it and investigated it to confirm that you can perform that level of cross border sleight of hand.
I had a talk to a lawyer friend of mine, and he told me that Columbia's used by various film companies as a growing spot for favourable copyright law for both Latin America and by extension of their convention signing, the United States. (It's only a bit of a surprise to me, only because of the fact that I focus on gaming, and for that, most test cases usually end up in Australia first. We get the fun stuff, test cases and all sorts of other Legal weaseling.)
Same principle applies though - they get Columbia to pass significantly easy Intellectual Property law, then ask the US to comply due to treaty and conventon signings. The judgement has to fit within the framework of specific agreements of course. Or you launch legal proceedings to create case law, which then can get carried across on the same grounds.
Most likely scenario? A party (or a firm) involved in managing NBGI's IP (We'll include Sony as well because of the next paragraph) saw this as an opportunity to protect their IP rights (namely for productivity and promotional reasons) and filed there.
My money's on Sony myself, since they have had a history of doing absurdities (DCMA, or Australian case law) in an attempt to protect regioning (Which is one reason you'd launch an action like this) - to try prevent leaks so you can promote it once again in new areas.
My money is also on the grounds that the ANIME uses this, and they're protecting their film, not their gaming, interests. It probably implies that there may be a small chance they may look into releasing the anime at least on a wider basis. This once again points to Sony Entertainment as the most likely filer.
