The real innovation of Youtube is its ability to provide individuals and groups of people a platform to showcase their entertainment to a large group of audience across continents by simple few ‘clicks of the mouse’. Anyone with a camcorder can film a video. However, nobody will be able to view it. To achieve that, one would have to search for sponsors and the video has to pass various critics before it could be aired on television. But with the creation of Youtube, one can easily upload a video within a few minutes to a large group of viewers.
However, this innovation has brought about a phenomenon that may ultimately cause its downfall. As any average Joe can post a video, people could just post video clips containing racism content or insulting certain individuals or organization. An example would be the recent video clips posted on Youtube that showed graffiti drawn over the king’s head. This caused Thailand government to ban access to Youtube nation-wide.
If other countries follow Thailand’s course of action when video clips critical of prominent figures in their country is uploaded, Youtube would lost its functionality and lead to its downfall.
A more imminent threat for Youtube would be court cases on copyright issues, which boils down to the question of who will provide or control access to it. If Youtube is unable to retain its authority on who provide or control access, it might well lost its purpose of existence. The media behemoths that acquire it would probably place many restrictions on the usage of Youtube, require memberships to be paid. This would eventually cause it to lose its popularity among users and the history of Napster might well be repeated.
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3 comments:
I agree that YouTube had allowed many people, including ordinary people like us to post our own videos online and share with the public. However, I do not agree that this innovation will lead to the downfall of YouTube because racism comments and insulting materials online make up only a small proportion of the videos posted on YouTube. Such videos are posted by irresponsible users but it is up to the public to tolerate and forgive such ignorant and selfish behaviour. As we are supposedly improving, both technologically and culturally, we should be more refined, understanding and tolerant individuals. Such example as the thailand blocking YouTube is an extreme behaviour and should not be seen throughout the world, especially in more liberated countries where freedom of speech is encouraged.
Pingkee, you have given a good overview on the issue of copyright and some of the problems that has occured. It was good that you have related to this trend to Napster. Perhaps you could have looked at how different types of countries or systems might grapple with this problem differently.
Well written article.
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