HI Nick :) I agree - the thing which used to scare my son as a three year old was a CBBC program where a face would magically appear on the side of a house! And it's almost impossible to guess exactly what will scare them, as you say. But my point regards how a parent can be helped to make a judgement in advance. For DVDs, I usually glance at IMDB, if it's something questionable for an 8-year/6-year old then I watch it first, and if I think it will disturb them then it stays on the shelf for a year or so (e.g. Spider-man, 12). Easy, job done, However for movies, then I don't have the time/cash to go and see it first myself. Looking at the 12A for Dark Knight, and the BBFC analysis ('supergero violence'), I may have been tempted to take my son along. However if they had explicitly tagged: torture, scary clown, knife attack, immediate violent threat to child (Two-face with a gun at Gordon's son's head) then I would be able to make a better informed decision. So my argument is that more granular metadata can *help* parents make that cinema going decision with more information up front. Fully agree that nothing can replace the parent's knowledge of the child, it's just the parent's knowledge of the film that can improve. PS I always thought the scariest part of Forbidden Planet was the fact that Leslie Nielsen was the captain!

This all sounds very wonderful! However, the 'horror' is usually within the context of the film it's self. For example, by shooting a scene from a low angle, low contrast colour and low light levels yo can make something that may seen OK becomes terrible to a child. My favourite discussion point in this is from my own two children. They love watching 'predator' movies, and find no difficulty in associating a fictional character in this type of film, and conversely a non fictional character in what they would most probably class as a 'boring' film. If I ask them the most frighting movie they have ever been allowed to watch (this is where I got totally wrong what I thought was good and bad for two people within my care) I get the answer "Forbidden Planet". A very old sci-fi movie about an alien machine that can make your thoughts real. The part of the movie which terrified both my children and caused them to asked me to turn off (and left me flabbergasted! ) the move was where an invisible 'being' creeps into the heroes ship and breaks a piece of the equipment. No blood, no violence, no harm! Just two children who invented in their own heads the most terrifying beast that only they could see. So you see, the whole debate around censorship is flawed in my opinion. It's very much down to the individual and the parent/guardian as to what is bad/good. I'm not to sure how web standards could help here!!!! :-)

"Meanwhile, a UK civil (not criminal court) has awarded punitive damages to a games manufacturer who paid to see who was sharing their new game online" This is slightly misleading - there was no award of punitive damages in this case. Rather, there was an interim damages award of £750; this is more than the price of the game itself, to reflect that the users were, as far as I am aware, uploading the game as well as downloading it. It's worth noting also that default judgement was granted, as none of the respondents turned up in court - the judge had little option but to find in favour of the claimants.