Paul Mcnamara

A mild case of social-media fatigue combined with the finite number of hours in a day has conspired to keep me from joining Pinterest, but the white-hot hype surrounding the site has become inescapable.

Over the past couple of days, I've come across a couple of interesting discussions involving Pinterest and copyright.

A video tribute produced by Apple employees in 1985 for Steve Jobs to celebrate his 30^th birthday - and first widely circulated on news sites and blogs after his death last October - has been yanked off of YouTube, apparently at the request of Sony Music Entertainment.

The 5-minute film, a photo montage of Jobs' early life and Apple accomplishments, is set to the song "My Back Pages" by Bob Dylan, an SME artist. The takedown message on YouTube reads: "This video contains content from SME, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

It's been six weeks since Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales took to Twitter to announce that his organization would be removing its domain name registrations from GoDaddy over what was then the latter's public support for SOPA.

Wikipedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, has announced that its annual fundraising campaign ended on Sunday having netted $20 million from more than a million donors - a record haul.

From a blog post announcing the accomplishment:

What's more laughable about this story?

Would it be that a department of motor vehicles has yanked the vanity plate LMAOATU, ruling it "vulgar" because, as most of you know, the A in the familiar texting and email acro LMAO stands for the body part upon which we sit?

Some 2,000 patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston have gotten one of those letters; you know, the one where a company or organization says, sorry, but we've let loose your personal information.

This time, though, it would appear as though the potential for damage is virtually non-existent.

We know Apple has claimed possession of the lowercase letter "i" and is fearsomely combative toward anyone with the audacity to name anything iProduct. Same goes for the word "app" followed by the word "store."

We also know that Apple considers its own products "magical;" so "magical," in fact, that the word is used over and over and over again in its advertisements and press releases.

So if we're to believe the man's own Twitter account of what happened, Twitpic founder Noah Everett was arrested for walking down the street buck naked, yet when placed in the back of a squad car--presumably handcuffed--he managed to whip out his, uh, mobile phone, snap a picture of the cruiser's interior, and post this "proof" of his predicament to the Internet using--what else?--Twitpic.

Your first question might be: How'd he do all that while handcuffed?

Could the Electronic Frontier Foundation - that bulwark of free speech -- possibly have caved in to the run-amok censors masquerading as British judges?

Well, if you're up on your gossipy news today you have probably heard of the censorship brouhaha embroiling the British press, courts, Parliament, various celebrities, Twitter users worldwide, and one poor sap of a soccer player who has apparently been carrying on with a woman not his wife. At the center of the mess is one of those "super-injunctions" peculiar to the British legal system, which in this case accomplished absolutely nothing except to guarantee that millions more people now know that footballer Ryan Giggs has been scoring at will with one Imogen Thomas, who I've seen described as a minor celebrity of some sort.

There are plenty of reasons to look with great suspicion upon advancing legislation in California that would impose detailed, strict privacy requirements on Facebook and other Web sites that collect personal information to facilitate social interaction.

The bill would essentially require users to set their privacy preferences at the time of registration, give site operators 48 hours to remove information upon request, and impose a $10,000 fine for each violation. You can read it here.

Today is Apple's 35^th birthday, as the company was launched on April 1, 1976.

Today is also April Fools' Day, of course.