As CNet reports today, Hollywood and YouTube may be edging towards their own version of Pax Romana. Meanwhile, beyond the learned walls of the law courts and Google’s battle with Viacom, we here at Social Cache have been scratching our heads over Viacom’s position.

Obviously Viacom is up in arms over what it argues is copyright infringement whenever one of its artists’ songs are used in a user-generated video. Their lawyers are even arguing that in most cases they want to set aside the notion of fair use. That in itself is ridiculous as in a lot of circumstances Viacom has stepped over the edge of copyright boundaries. In 2007 Viacom sent YouTube 100,000 takedown notices! And as this video from the EFF points out, many of those videos that Viacom had asked YouTube to remove, were not infringing anyone’s copyright.

We ourselves received a takedown notice and had a video removed from YouTube. The video was of one of our numerous snowboarding expeditions to Mt Hood and it included a clip of a song by the group White Zombie. We could have argued that under the law if we had used the music for parody, for comment, for criticism, for news reporting or for non-commercial use then we’d be in the clear. In this instance it was the latter - non-commercial use. We couldn’t be bothered, we weren’t that attached to the video and anyway, like millions of other folks, we put up videos at an alarming rate. Here’s our latest.

So here’s the Nemo and Social Cash POV. By removing our video Viacom denied thousands of people the pleasure of hearing a White Zombie song. One of its own artists! And no money was changing hands. One solution - Viacom should provide YouTube with a license from a roster of its artists who agree that their music can be used in a video for non-commercial use. In return YouTube provides its users with a simple license that allows users to add music from these artists to their amateur videos for non-commercial use for a small fee of, perhaps $3.00. Now Viacom and its artists get a share of this revenue, YouTube users won’t receive takedown notices, and Viacom can go a long way to recouping its, no doubt, millions of dollars it is spending on these lawsuits.

You’re welcome. Let me know why it won’t work….

Meanwhile over at MySpace, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has a business that’s built on the backs of thousands of unsigned musicians. Who is looking out for them?

Other than an elongated literary adventure through Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy,’ reading ‘All The Pretty Horses,’ ‘The Crossing’ and ‘Cities of the Plain’ in the summer of 2005, followed in 2006 by reading McCarthy’s masterpiece, the aweful ‘Blood Meridian‘ [and I use aweful by way of its true Middle English definition - "Filled with awe, especially: 1. Filled with or displaying great reverence.",] I’m not inclined to reading novels. McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country For Old Men’ were both outstanding and Martin Amis turns out great work but I prefer non-fiction; currently I am buried in E.O.Wilson’s ‘Consilience’, re-reading Robert Wright’s ‘The Moral Animal’ and am halfway through John Gray’s ‘Al Qaeda And What It Means To Be Modern’ having finally finished his ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans and Other Animals’ for the third time. This summer’s less than light reading list just grew by two - the Amazon package today contained John Gray’s ‘Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death Of Utopia,’ and ‘Heresies: Against Progress And Other Illusions.’

Otherwise I’m keeping an eye on the Madonna - Guy Ritchie marital farce.

An oil rig off the coast of California

Here in Portland I am seeing signs that the price of gas is making a difference in how people get around the city. Bus ridership has spiked, there are less cars on the road during the commuting hours and bicyclists seem to be everywhere. Yesterday as I walked my dog along the banks of the Willamette River, I noticed far more sailboats than the motorized variety. Maybe the price of gas is making Americans think twice before getting into the car? Maybe.

I carpool to the Nemo warehouse and it’s still a drag to see that of those cars that are on the road I’d guess that 95% of them are occupied by only the driver. And don’t get me started on the hypocritical Prius owners who fly past at speeds that exceed the legal limits. And on Sunday’s the Hillsdale Farmer’s Market is filled with people buying fresh, locally-produced organic food while the parking lot and the surrounding streets are crammed with their cars. None of this makes sense. If you’re concerned perhaps you can leave a comment on their blog.

It seemed that once gas went through $4 a gallon and the $100 fill up entered the public’s economic equation we’d see a marked change in the way we would use our energy. Unfortunately that’s really not the case.

Portland is one of the more environmentally-friendly and green cities in North America. If we can’t break the automobiles stranglehold on our city then what hope for other cities that are less friendly toward buses and bicyclists? Portland has also shown strong support for ending the war in Iraq. If we disagree with the Iraq war, and the inevitable future Middle East wars that will be fought over oil and water resources, what will we Portlanders do at home to reduce our dependence on foreign oil?

I argue that if we are unwilling to drastically reduce our gasoline use then it is hypocritical of us to oppose off-shore drilling in California and drilling and exploration in Alaska. We simply can’t have our cake and eat it.

Today, President George W. Bush plans to lift a presidential ban on offshore drilling to combat soaring energy prices, a largely symbolic move unlikely to have any short-term impact on the high cost of gasoline.

Who will stand in his way this time?

Related Post: I’m Sick of the Co-Opting of Green

Well not exactly. Portland, Or, the home of Nemo and thousands of cyclists has a problem it seems. The price of gas, the economic slump and the fact that Portland is a cyclists dream city has led to an uptick in the amount of folks biking everywhere. Inevitably they run into vehicles, and I’m speaking both literally and figuratively.

It’s causing a lot of friction. Case in point being this video of a fracas, that took place outside our offices here at Nemo, between a motorist and a cyclist caused, according to the driver, by the cyclist not obeying traffic lights. The biker literally attacks the guys car with his bike.

On the local blogs both sides have weighed in about who’s right and who’s wrong but there is only one solution - car-free streets for cyclists and pedestrians [who are treated worse than cyclists by drivers if you ask me.]

That’s not a boast. Another answer to that question is simple; if you write a blog, you own PR too.

Press releases by the thousands hit editors desks and inboxes daily. The best editors have no doubt created a system for separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to a good story, but they are still gatekeepers although their gates are becoming smaller and easier to bound over. We are in the age of PR 2.0 as Brian Solis calls it. He as written a paper entitled ‘The Social Media Manifesto – Integrating Social Media into Marketing Communications.‘ He spells out his case very succinctly and avoids most of the jargon that you might expect in a paper on this subject [although some clichés remain.] You can read it here.

A Press Release? Here’s one definition from many that I found online - ‘An announcement of an event, performance, or other newsworthy item that is issued to the press.’ The definition is straightforward and very, very dry, a phrase that unfortunately describes every press release I’ve ever seen. So how does your story get noticed through the crowds and the white noise?

You could go crazy with all the options that are available but I’m thinking that a less is more approach may be more effective. Again common wisdom suggests that you should use Digg, Del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc, etc. Although those tools are all undoubtedly useful, the problem is that you have to manage all of these accounts and that is time consuming. Also is your story relevant, to say your Facebook group? In fact have you asked yourself - “Does my company even need a Facebook group?” Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And of course this all begins with the best story that you have to tell, otherwise all of your efforts using any social media will fail. A non-story is a non-story, period.

This is our current approach at Nemo:

We have multiple blogs and bloggers and we experimented with social media for a while before jumping in and writing about our ideas and thoughts. Social Cache is an example of how we intend to participate as thought-leaders and contributors. We are not selling anything here.

Our blogs have distinct voices and authority in the areas of music at Pampelmoose, fashion at Nubby Twiglet, art and design at strange|beautiful and photography at Nemo Productions & Photography.

We create videos and upload them to YouTube and Vimeo [33,460 folks watched that one,] and we drop our photos off at our Flickr site.

We have a Muxtape so you can listen to what we are listening to.

We have LinkedIn profiles for all of our executive staff, here’s our Creative Director, Mark Lewman’s. We even have a Facebook group. [I'm struggling with this one, more later.]

We are lacking in the blogroll department. We need a stronger blogroll on Social Cache.

We have our own Ning social network specific to our company. It’s been in private beta but soon it will be unleashed to the world. Here’s a sneak peek of some of the Nemo team celebrating the delivery of new web sites that we built for HP Blackbird and VooDoo PC. Click those links to see our work.

Find more videos like this on NEMO

When it comes to PR and marketing at Nemo we are following the basic rules of social media. We listen and we participate. We wait to be invited in. We start conversations. We encourage comments.

And we love our employees, even when they leave us…watch the video below.

Find more videos like this on NEMO

Our very own Nubby has an art show in Portland on July 2nd. I won’t embarrass her by rambling on about how great her work is, just go see for yourself if you’re any where near PDX.

“A new collection of graphic black + white artwork from Nubbytwiglet.com, the Black & White Graphic Insight series is an ode to my love of graphic design.”

Black & White Graphic Insight
Reception: July 2nd, 6-9 pm
Show runs July 2nd to August 3rd, 2008

@ Vino Paradiso
417 N.W. 10th
Portland, OR 97209
Gallery Paradiso website