Case About Hi Money Com example essay topic

Nonmarket issues for Hi Money. comAs the Internet becomes more popular, Dot-come also become more prosperous. And the pace of the world becomes faster as well. Nowadays, with these huge changes in information transmission, some non market issues gradually appear in this new industry because of its characteristics of free-resource, high-speed and anonymity. In this case about Hi Money. com, this firm got two pressing non market issues since it launched last year.

One was concerning the conflicts between two groups in this year's presidential election in Taiwan. Another issue is targeting the free-resource in the Internet. A similar case that happened recently is Napster. com (a dot-com that provides software to let people download MP 3 music for free). I! |ll talk about it later in detail.

Company Introduction Hi Money. com is a Taiwan-based international Internet Company founded in June 1999 to provide the shortest path, decision critical financial instrument investment knowledge to both regional and global investors. While the world is moving into Consumer Centric Economy, financial products in this new era become more fast changing, diversified and complex. Hi Money. com provides investors and analysts an open platform to exchange and cultivate investment ideas and return. Although Hi Money. com is an international company with three branches in China, USA and Taiwan at the present, its target market still aims at the Taiwanese around the world. Its entire employees also come from Taiwan and the purpose of this company is to help Taiwanese invest their money in international securities markets like USA, China, Korea and Hongkong. Nonmarket issue 1: Politic conflicts For quite a long time, there is a serious problem about group conflicts in Taiwan.

Basically, there are two main political groups: one is native Taiwanese whose ancestors came to Taiwan from Mainland China before 20th century, another one is immigrants withdrawing from Mainland China around 1949 together with their families. Currently, the ratio for these two groups is 4: 1. Usually, they coexist peacefully in this small island. Unfortunately, some politicians like to stimulate conflict between these two groups so as to gain their political support whenever we hold elections in Taiwan. After January 2000, as our president election campaign was becoming more and more intensive, we could read different kinds of reports about president candidates attacking each other from the different media.

In the era of the Internet, information exchange is becoming faster than before, and many people rely heavily on the Internet and computer. On the contrary, some negative and subjective viewpoints spread out also faster. So, we can often receive a lot of forward emails about this kind of information. For example in Hi Money. com, an employee sent this kind of email talking about the conflict between two groups to all the staff in this company. Because of the negligence of the manager of the computer information system, this distorted political report was spread out to this firm's end users and members from this firm's computer server. Furthermore, it may look like the email came from a high level manager's computer.

Basically, this kind of Email was very common in our daily life. However, if this kind of mail was sent from a high level manger of a private company, what could be its implications? That means, for the people in Taiwan, obviously, this company had its specific political tendency. For a financial website's conductor, he should not spread out the subject or unproved information to the public since the website is a part of public media. Some media and journalists report this story to the public. The image and standing of this company will be hurt.

Worse of all, the employees in Hi Money. com contains these two groups of people. So, this Email created a conflict between its employees. This situation also made Hi Money. com paralyzed. After this event, hi money. com held two emergence meetings to review the reasons why it happened and the contribution of responsibility. Most importantly, its entire staffs realized the importance of monitoring its computer information system. Nonmarket issue 2: Copyright Second, let's discuss about the website's financial analysis report.

The report of this website has three content resources. First is a self-created article. A second one is purchased from other resources. The third is something like BBS function where its end-user and members can post their own financial reports or person opinions on this BBS. The last one has caused created a controversial issue of copyright in Taiwan recently.

A financial website would receive an abundance of messages from its users and members. This kind of information exchange is very fast and hard to control in terms of quality. For the end users, in order to support their financial analysis and prediction, they often copy and paste some other content from other resources. Obviously, this action will often directly challenge the copyright laws. Although this problem has existed for a long time, but the concepts of copyright for Taiwanese are still weak.

So, in this case of Hi Money. com, it also frequently faces this kind of troubles because the news providers often protest that lots of users use their content as their own prospective. Even most of the end users already knew the problem of copyright and rewrote or modified the content they used, but this controversial issue still exists since the copyright laws is in some way still considered a gray matter. After facing some lawsuits of copyright invasion, the management decided to enhance the control of the content on its BBS. The requirements basically are simple: when end users post their financial analysis report, as long as they can mark clearly their original resource in their analysis reports, copyright problems will dramatically decrease. Analysis and recommend a course of action In my opinion, a private company should maintain neutrality in its political stand.

Therefore, its entire employees with differing political stands can get along with each other without any problems. In regard to the invasion of copyright on the Internet, it's a new private non market issue and we can! |t find any previous example for it. In my opinion, from the view of laws, I don! |t think Hi Money. com should be responsible for the invasion of copyright of their end-users and members since BBS is open to the public and it is difficult to manage. But on the other hand, from an ethical point of view, I think Hi Money. com should do its best to control the quality of its BBS's end-user, members and content to support the copyright laws. I must talk about the Napster's case here because these two cases have some similar points and both cases are still ongoing. Napster is a CA-based dot-com providing special download software for people to share and search their favorite music in MP 3 format.

The Napster doesn! |t really provide MP 3 music to its members but every members can use its software to share their music. I do not think that Napster invaded the copyright of those artists whose songs were copied so many times in the Internet since it is its members who did it. So, essentially the guilty party is Napster's members. We may say Napster is crafty, but we cannot say that it is guilty.