YouTube

1. “YouTube has no ethics, it's been created for the sole purpose of entertainment and money.” Do you agree?

YouTube is now one of the largest and most popular video sharing site, hosting more than 8,260,000 videos with millions of viewers worldwide. Unregistered users can watch the videos on the site whereas registered users are allowed to upload unlimited number of videos, comment on videos and rating them. However, there are no restrictions to what can be posted by the users, be it videos or comments,leading to undesired consequences like copyright infringement, violence in teenagers, uploading of rebuttals and rating the public service announcements down ( when the Office of National Drug Control Policy of the US began running anti-drug messages on YouTube) and many more. this leads us to rethink about the purpose of setting up YouTube. Is it just a money-churning machine for its creators? Is it only a form of entertainment and does it have ethnics?

In one case, the owner of YouTube, Google, declined to remove a video insulting the Thai king, which is an offence in Thailand. In another, it refused to budge and pay Viacom a sum of 1 billion dollars for infringement of copyrighted materials. These are wrong decisions made by the management, especially for the former incident. However, from another perspective, with 65,000 videos being uploaded onto YouTube per day, it is difficult for the staff to look through every one of them and check if it fulfill copyright laws before allowing them to be put on the site. Besides, YouTube is offering Viacom a licensing fee or a piece of any revenue generated on YouTube from Viacom programming. Other firms like Hollywood is still divided on youtube as seen from the quote “While lawyers are demanding filtering technology, many Hollywood execs actually enjoy the fact that YouTube only takes down clips when they request it. "If I found part of a successful show up on YouTube today, I'd probably pull it down immediately . . . If I had a show that wasn't doing so well in the ratings and could use the promotion, I wouldn't be in a rush to do that.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube#Copyright_infringement
While videos portraying violence and pornography can be found on the site, there are also beneficial videos, such as the sharing of health advice on how to use certain medical kits or encouraging self-checks for tumour in the breasts.

Youtube is not without enthnics. Ultimately, it is just a company with it’s own limitations. It is unable to removed all the videos that does not follow the rules and regulations and it is the users responsibility to upload only suitable videos and report, if not flag any materials deemed unsuitable for viewing