YouTube, Plagiarism and a Maturing Medium

A ten-year-old medium with the reach of over a billion...

youtube-385-sizedWith the recent Matthew Santoro Plagiarism Scandal (and the update) YouTube seems to be in a period of extreme upheaval over the issue of attribution.

But even as the scandal continues to unfold, there’s one question that keeps coming up: Why now?

While the short answer is that GradeAUnderA exposed a scandal that struck a nerve, the truth is that the whole story had been known for sometime, it just caused an uproar following the GradeA video.

The reason for this is somewhat nuanced, but what it comes down to is that YouTube is a maturing medium. Though it has a reach of over a billion viewers, it’s still only a ten-year-old medium and, with that young age, comes a lot of growing pains.

A quick comparison of YouTube to radio and television shows the growth of this medium is unprecedented and it’s easy to see how it’s reached a mammoth audience even though many of its biggest stars are struggling with ethical issues.

In this video we take a look at how YouTube is maturing and why stories like Matthew Santoro’s are, in the long run, good for the site and its future.

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