Monthly Archives: February 2012

The Year the Music Died

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Say hello to my little friendLast night’s Academy Awards provided many memorable moments for fans of the big screen and the glitz it attracts.  From Jennifer Lopez’s alleged “Nip Slip”, Angelia Jolie proving her leg does indeed go all the way to her hip, to Sacha Baron Cohen baptizing Ryan Seacrest; there was a tsunami of twitter buzz through-out the night.

There was however, something that quietly snuck by.  The 2011 Academy Awards had only 2 songs nominated for an Oscar.  Never in the history of the award has so few songs been selected.  (3 songs were nominated in 2008, 2005, 1935 and 1934).

In his acceptance speech last night, Bret McKenzie thanked Disney for “making movies with songs in them”.  Afterwards, McKenzie said he was more than happy to have less competition, “Well, I am not sure why they only nominated two songs, but I was very happy with that situation.”

So does this bode bad news for song writers?  14 songs were nominated in 1945 (“It Might as Well be Spring” from the movie “State Fair” took the statue home that year) Past winners include such great names as Tim Rice, Burt Bacharach, Elton John, Oscar Hammerstein II, Randy Newman, Bob Dylan, Eminem and Henri Mancini just to name a few .

Perhaps it was just an anomaly; still one has to hope that along with amazing 3-D visual images, mind-blowing computer animation, incredible special effects and brilliant writing, there might be room in there for a good song or two.

It’s Pinsanity!

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Forget “Linsanity”.  “Pinsanity” has officially taken over the internet.  I speak, of course, about the latest social media craze; www.pinterest.com.  It seems everyone these days is surfing the internet and pinning photos of clothes, cute pets, recipes and just about anything else you can imagine to their digital bulletin boards.  www.pinterest.com has become one of the top 10 social networking sites, but now cold water is being thrown in its face with accusations of copyright infringement.

You see, most of the photos being pinned belongs to someone else, which could violate the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).  The site’s Terms of Service are clear, but some industry leaders suggest that 98% of the materials being posted are in direct violation of those terms.  What’s a website to do?  www.pinterest.com does have a way for someone to report unlicensed use of material, but appears to do very little in policing the site itself. 

To help deflect some of the criticism, www.pinterest.com is now providing websites with code that will block people from being able to pin material.  They also limit pin captions to 500-characters to stop people from stealing blog posts.   www.pinterest.com has another advantage in that the posts can drive traffic back to the original source and are letting publishers embed a “Pin It” button directly on their website, which is a virtual permission slip for people to share content. 

Still, not everyone is happy and one wonders if www.pinterest.com will fall of the way of other sites like Napster.