Someone posted an irrelevant comment on my previous blog entry and it somehow got caught in my spam filter. I read the comment more closely and discovered the commenter posted several links to a site called YouPorn.com, and the links are to a lovemaking couple that the commenter claims to be “evidently Singaporean”.

There are two main issues to this matter. The first is a porn version of YouTube. It should come as no surprise to me as a student of new media that the porn cousin of YouTube has finally made its appearance. After all, it is well known that the most profitable online businesses belong to the pornography industry. The appearance of YouPorn (notice how the name is deliberately made similar to YouTube) brings about many implications.

The first of course is whether the porn industry is going to go bust now that free porn of pretty acceptable quality is available to anyone with an Internet browser. The second implication is that ease of accessibility to pornography to minors just went up another level. I do not object to pornography for adults, but I am concerned about young, impressionable kids who might be watching the videos in their own bedrooms without any form of guidance. The last implication, which coincides with the second issue I’m going to deal with, is the issue of ordinary folks uploading their own making out videos online.

I cannot verify whether the couple in the YouPorn video are indeed Singaporeans, although I am of the opinion that there’s a high probability. Assuming that the couple is indeed Singaporean, then we are looking at Tammy version 2.0. And the same old questions that were being asked during the Tammy saga will surface again, especially questions of morality. To what extent can we accept exhibitionism in Singapore?

I think YouPorn is going to be an interesting case for many countries in the world. YouTube has already caused quite a fair bit of problems in terms of copyright issues. YouPorn has the potential to cause not only copyright issues (with the pornography industry), but it will also cause moral panic. I’m going to wait and see how the issue of YouPorn will pan out across the world.

Note:

I am not re-posting the links to the video that was supplied by the original commenter because I am not sure if I will be contravening any Singapore law on pornography in doing so. Although I have a policy of allowing free speech, I’m not permitting any comment that contains links to the videos for the reason stated in the preceding sentence. I hope everyone understands that this is a grey area in terms of law.