Inside View from Ireland

Rate This I for Idiotic

SILICON VALLEY -- As John Pazlowski tells it, "Great minds think alike. And so do lesser ones, apparently." He writes how the Motion Picture Association of America sued 200 alleged online movie pirates Tuesday, seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each film offered or downloaded on peer-to-peer networks. The lawsuits are the first of their kind to be filed by the movie industry, which two weeks ago announced its intentions (see "You mean we can alienate customers AND throw money down a rathole? Where do we sign up?").

RS3 Aggregates then reads

DOC SEARLS -- Alan Snyder has a Linux program on SourceForge called RS3, that takes a set of RSS feeds, crawls and scrapes the original article linked to in each feed item, summarizes that page, and then optionally converts that text summary to speech and a playlist.

Outsourced to orangutans

PHILADELPHIA -- As an American living in Ireland, I know there's always a possibility that I might return to Pennsylvania. So I monitor the jobs market there, especially the pulse of the Philadelphia IT sector where troubling reports about outsourcing have emerged on the ground an in literature written by a distant relative.

Of Cluetrain and Containers in the Commons

DOC -- Rewind four years in the Irish internet industry and you would hear "content is king" parroted throughout the kingdom of saints and scholars. Some of those trumpters still have not spun their own RSS feeds. An ocean away, Doc Searls had a better take on things. He saw the internet as a connected community offering research opportunities for people who vetted each other through reputation. Rewind two years and you would hear Doc Searls at the OS Conference say

Hollywood sees the Net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and other content,
Geeks see the Net as a place - a commons - where people can make culture and do business.
Ask, "Who creates this 'content'?" and you've bridged the divide. Ask, "Who finances the creation of this 'content'?" and another problem emerges.

Trials of grazing a baton

DUBLIN -- A Dublin garda escaped with a not-guilty verdict following a case brought against him for striking a "Reclaim the Streets" protestor. In a satirical rendering of the trial proceedings, "Newton's Optic" holds that "even middle-class teenagers deserve a whack round the head from a policeman if they are sufficiently irritating, a Dublin court ruled."

How to never miss an episode with Bit Torrent

PEALCO -- You can get Tivo for free by using BitTorrent and RSS to stay abreast of your favourite shows. Never miss an episode. Never worry about going to Suprnova to download the torrent. Never have to wait the hours for the torrent to download. Just fire up a BT client that scans RSS feeds for torrents that match specific criteria and you're laughing.

Safe Home an Ultimate Deception

FALLUJAH -- Sky News has crackling gunfire on its late night reports as US soldiers mount their offensive into Fallujah. I don't watch the images or won't follow the newsfeed because I think there's a fallacy at work in Fallujah. Sky and Fox will show the march of the armed chariots into dusty streets but there is no camera footage of cheering crowds because the Americans have no allies in Iraq. Even those who benefited from the ouster of Saddam, people hate the imperalistic American force. Worse still, those invaded don't believe anything bearing an American flag.

Art on your hard drive

TEMPLE BAR -- You cannot help but question the reach of creativity and the artistic merit of some new media projects that hang in exhibition space with the label "art" wrapped around them. Judged against the by-product of Sunday painters or even art in Starbucks, you have to wonder if effort, craftsmanship or attention to detail matter anymore. At least those issues bother me, partly because I'm halfway through an MA in Visual Arts Practises and partly because I've the Darklight Film Festival on my radar scope in the Dublin Digital District next week. As television commercials and literature printed in Cantonese suggest, the Darklight Film Festival promises to be more diverse than its predecessors. The four-day event continues through the weekend in Dublin’s Digital Hub in Thomas Street. A full programme sits online at darklight-filmfestival.com and as might be expected, the most popular offerings this year could be the music videos.

Darklight’s curators, well-seasoned after several years of culling the best for viewing in Ireland, included a guest appearance from the Lynn Fox creative team, the one responsible for several memorable Bjork videos. Anyone contemplating a degree in film production or studying contemporary art should pay the €10 and enjoy a full day of activities.

The festival organisers are showing work from Desperate Optimists, an Irish group currently exhibiting in the Brazil Biennale. They will be part of a double bill with David Phillips and Paul Rowley, visual artists with a flair for after effects.