YouTube. It's about ethical or unethical media publishing.

What is YouTube? YouTube is a website that can upload, view and share videos among people.

Is copyright very important?
YouTube has been very strict about the copyrights of the videos that users uploaded.
The copyrighted contents are:

• TV shows
  Sport broadcasts, new broadcasts, comedy, cartoons, drama, reality shows and others


• Music videos
  From music video channels: MTV, Channel V and others


• Videos of live concerts:
  Performers/ celebrities or song writers or producers have the rights to control their images or songs being uploaded and published at YouTube even though the users captured the video by them.


• Movies and movie trailers


• Commercials


• Slides shows include images owned by other people
  (YouTube 2008)

Copyrights are important and major issue in media publishing. Web users are not allowed to upload any videos or images that not owned by them. This will consider as pirated issue.

For example, Viacom has sued YouTube for taking down all the pirated clips because the users or YouTube did not have any copyrights and permission to upload videos from Viacom (Lombardi 2008). The video clips are produced by Viacom including MTV Networks, Comedy Central, BET and VH-1. YouTube has been called to remove the video clips such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, South Park and The Colbert Report. Saturday Night Live from NBC’s TV has been removed that showed and published on the YouTube right after YouTube become famous (Sandoval 2006). The pirated issue will be focus on in this case. There are about 100,000 video clips produced by Viacom has being uploaded by YouTube without permission from Viacom (Sandoval 2007).

South Park from Google.com

Unethical and ethical media publishing
Those violent videos are not supposed and not allowed to upload to YouTube. For example, there is a fight between school girls in Miri, Sarawak was uploaded to YouTube. This is an unethical issue. There is beneficial video such as Marie Digby. She uploaded her own videos at YouTube and there are a lot of viewers that watch her videos. Later on, she was spotted by the record label company. From then, she has become a famous singer in United States.

Marie Digby's video from Youtube.com

It will be using a short time to wait for the videos to load. Search box is place at the top and bottom of the page in order to make it easy for web users to search particular videos or images. YouTube is up-to-date with links and high quality videos and most of them are accurate.

Search box tools from YouTube.com

My point of view
In my opinion, ethical media publishing should be emphasized by the web users. In this case, web users should not simply post up the videos that contain copyrights unless they have the permission to upload and post up the videos or images. Somehow, this copyrights will effect the audiences.

Reference Lists:
Lombardi, C. 2007, “Viacom to YouTube: Take down pirated clips”, CNet News, viewed on 9 June 2008 at <http://news.cnet.com/Viacom-to-YouTube-Take-down-pirated-clips/2100-1026_3-6155771.html?tag=item>

Sandoval, G. 2006, “YouTube’s no friend to copyright violators”, CNet News, viewed on 9 June 2008 at <http://news.cnet.com/YouTubes-no-friend-to-copyright-violators/2100-1030_3-6128252.html>

Sandoval, G. 2007, “Viacom demands Google, YouTube to pull 100,000 clips”, CNet News, viewed on 9 June 2008 at <http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6155737-7.html>

YouTube 2008, “Copyright tips”, viewed on 9 June 2008 at <http://www.youtube.com/t/howto_copyright>