1. “YouTube has no ethics, it's been created for the sole purpose of entertainment and money.” Do you agree?
YouTube was actually founded in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim with the idea of creating a video sharing websites after they themselves had difficulties finding videos that they themselves want to watch on the internet. Their main objective was to create a site where users could upload, share and watch videos for free. So that idea bloomed with funding from external investors and the site launched in November 2005.
The founders themselves should have thought of the problem of piracy but yet, they went ahead. Soon, the site became popular. Over 65000 videos including TV clips, anime episodes, DIY clips etc were uploaded every day and more than 100 million different of them watched everyday. Without the need to download any software or even to register, users can browse through most of the videos on the site. It was even named TIME’s magazine’s Invention of the year for 2006 and voted as one of the most user friendly websites by the users.
Thus, I feel that YouTube is created simply to provide us with another mode of entertainment and medium for broadcasting yourself. It is in fact a new way for us to showcase ourselves, a new way for us to express ourselves other than in words and pictures in blogs etc. It has enabled ordinary people who shows their talents on YouTube t be discovered and groomed by companies and made famous. There are also some leaders who have been made embarrassed in the videos either directly or indirectly through criticisms alike. First hand videos unlike those made by journalists are also uploaded and shared daily. The videos could also be shared through mediums like blogs, emails etc. This has certainly made added a whole new type of entertainment for the Internet. Internet service providers are also aware of the surge in bandwidth needed due to increase in videos downloads and thus have launched faster speeds at yet even lower prices.
However, lately, there has been uproar about the website by Thailand over its refusal to remove videos uploaded that insult the Thai King. Even before this, there has been some countries like Iran, schools in the US and Australia banning the use of the websites sue to content they deemed “not appropriate”. There are also companies like ViaCom wanting to sue YouTube over copyrighted videos.
It is the users themselves, who actually uploaded the content regardless of it might be copyrighted, or offensive etc. YouTube does have employees to police the website, but it is really impossible to look through the thousands of videos uploaded everyday. YouTube do respond to users who sometimes report the offensive material by deleting them or restricting them. YouTube do also remove content that is copyrighted when the media companies report them, only to have the same videos uploaded often again later. YouTube also collaborates with media companies to enable them to provide some clips for the site.
Hence, in my conclusion, I feel that YouTube do actually have some ethics and it is the users themselves who have to be educated the same way as media companies does to discourage people from buying pirated CDs or downloading songs from illegal websites sources to avoid paying for the content.
