You Tube

You Tube

Introduction

In January 2005 YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, and Jawed Karim (USA Today.com, 2006). After a dinner party they tried to send each other a video they created but the file was too large to send via regular e mail. As a result, they designed a simpler way to view the video by building the website now known as YouTube: a video sharing website that the public can upload, view, and share video clips on. Eleven months later the website was one of the most popular sites on the internet. On October 16, 2006, Chen and Hurley sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion. Karim had already stepped out of the business, although he did receive benefits from the sale. On March 13, 2007, Viacom sued YouTube and Google for copyright infringement. The case was filed in New York's federal court. The YouTube website has affected authors, songwriters, producers, performers, and many others. Viacom has demanded YouTube to remove all copyrighted works from their site. Viacom has sued YouTube for $1 billion. In this essay, Viacom's allegations and YouTube's responses will be discussed in detail.

Agency Law in the Business Environment

Agency law deals with voluntary relationship between two parties consisting of a principal and an agent. The agent is authorized by express or implied consent to act on behalf of the principal. The designated agent can thus affect or conduct the legal affairs of the principal. The authorized acts of the agent are thus considered to be the acts of the principal, who is entitled to the benefits, if any, from these actions. The relationship differs from that of master and servant in that the agent is the representative, as well as the employee, of the principal (Encarta, 2007). The applications and liabilities of agency law vary as it relates to today's business environment. YouTube and Google, as well as other companies have set up forms of agent and principal relationships by simply conducting daily business operations. In this case, Google is the principal and YouTube is the agent.

Types of Business Entities

A business entity is defined as an entity that is a group of people organized for some profitable or charitable purpose. Business entities include organizations such as corporations, partnerships, charities, trusts, and other forms of organization (About taxes.com, 2007). There are six different types of legal business entities. They are sole proprietorship, general partnership, limited partnership, limited liability company, limited liability partnership, and corporations (How-To Network.com, 2007). Sole proprietorship is a business owned by one person, i.e., an individual. For Internal Revenue Service purposes, this partnership is recognized as a sole business entity. General partnership is a business owned by two or more people in which each partner must contribute equally. A limited partnership is a business structure that allows one or more partners (called limited partners) to enjoy limited personal liability for partnership debts while another partner or partners (called general partners) have unlimited personal liability. The key difference between a general and limited partner ...