has launched a major legal action against one of Australia’s largest internet service providers for allegedly allowing its users to download pirated movies and TV shows.

Note to AFACT - it’s over, done, dusted, the world’s moved on, the geni is out of the bottle. In this downturn, where budgets are tight, don’t waste your money suing large scale legitimate businesses , who are ironically quite possibly protected by -

safe harbour provisions that were introduced with the US free trade agreement, which provides immunity for ISPs in certain circumstances such as transmission, hosting, caching and referencing activities

Make your offerings fair priced, more convenient and better value than unlicensed material (piracy is what bad guys with AK47’s do in the waters of Somalia, in the South China Seas, and elsewhere in the world. Whatever people are doing watching unlicensed material, it’s sure as heck not piracy) and as the music industry has seen, people will gladly buy instead of downloading from file sharing services.

But every time I put a DVD on for my daughters, to have to site though an interminable copyright warning that treats me like a thief, and frustrates my two girls under 3, which I can’t skip through you are actually providing a worse service than unlicensed copies that don’t have this notice (just for the record, I have many dozens of paid for DVDs, and no unlicensed ones).

What is wrong with this country, where both the Federal Government, and now the entire film and television industry it would seem is hell bent on making the life of ISPs as difficult as possible, doubtless driving up prices in a country where broadband adoption still languishes behind much of the rest of the world?

Like the French in 1939, this is fighting the last war.

One last thing. Why not go after the really big guns - BigPond or Optus, instead of iiNet? I imagine because those companies pockets are deep enough that they are much less likely to settle than iiNet, setting a precendent for future actions.

Haven’t you people heard there’s a recession on - stop wasting your money on nonsense like this, and start providing reasons for people to give you their hard earned money.

Here’s a perfect example.

I’ve been using Facebook to message a small number of folks I’ve messaged in the past about various professional matters. Sadly, the send mechanism simply wasn’t working. In fact, Facebook advised me of a problem and suggested I try again later. So, I tried again, and then saw in my outbox that the original message had also been sent. So, like any polite person, I decided to apologize to these couple of people I sent mutltiple messages to.

Here’s how Facebook responded

So, let’s walk through this.

1. I use Facebook entirely appropriately
2. Facebook makes a mistake and tells me a message was not sent when it was
3. Due to Facebook’s mistake I send a second message
4. As a polite person, I try to rectify this by apologizing to the recipient
5. Facebook then threatens me with arbitrary social and professional death (disabling my account, a status from which I doubt it would be easy to return)
Facebook also incorrectly tells me I am a spammer (not “may be” but “you are using this feature to spam others”)

Here’s the thing Facebook. I’m effing well not a spammer. In fact in the 15 or more years that I’ve been professionally or personally been using the web (since about the time Mark Zuckerberg was in diapers), and in which time having sent tens if not hundreds of thousands of emails, barely a handful of people (and I mean one handful) have ever accused me of spamming them. And in every case I can recall we’ve been able to to come to an understanding of why the email had been sent, and those recipients no longer felt they had been spammed.

I have a lot of concerns as a matter of fact Facebook. Frankly your threats and misplaced accusations are extremely worrying, particularly as I was trying to undo your errors.

So, despite being pretty angry, here’s some constructive suggestions for the message:

Hmmm - are you sure you want to send this message?

It seems that you’ve recently sent the recipient a couple of messages. As we don’t have them down as a friend of yours, our magical robots, not being all that smart, can take this as evidence of spamming.
Of course, there’s a very good chance that the message you are about to send is anything but spam, in which case, send away.
But, if it does happen to be spam, think again - our magical robots are watching, and in order to make sure Facebook keeps working for everyone, we do our best to stop spam and the people who send it.

Speaking to people like they are people, and not assuming, let along accusing them of anti social (or worse) behavior is not too hard.

Must try harder.

“Because he could”, to demonstrate the possibilities of this approach, Cameron fused his twin fascinations (music and code) to make the world’s first JavaScript drum machine. Behold, the JS-909.

This specification describes the fifth major version of the HTML vocabulary. It provides the details necessary for producers of HTML to create conformant HTML documents. By design, it does not describe related APIs nor attempt to describe how consumers of HTML are meant to process HTML documents.

In essence, it’s a web authors guide to HTML.

If you’ve not been following the HTML5 saga closely, there’ll be some new, as well as some familiar things there, including the obsoleting of the font element!

There’ll be a long path from here to this becoming a W3 recommendation, but it is an important step nonetheless.

Events like Web Directions aren’t at all common here, and despite I think some skepticism, turnout was fantastic, and the response by those involved who I’ve spoken with has been extremely positive.

To get a little taste, here’s some photos on Flickr. My favourite part was the ice sculpture of the WDE logo and Mitsue Links logo (Mitsue was our generous reception sponsor).

Here’s to many more events in fabulous Tokyo!

This blog post from Khoi Vinh got me thinking.

Interesting that Khoi chose to publish the photo in black and white. Maybe he always does this to fit in with the style of his blog, but, for me it emphasises a broader point as well. A medium doesn’t just die: it gets folded into that which comes after it, and its significance changes accordingly. Color photography didn’t kill the black and white image. Slowly, slowly, it just gave it a new meaning: what was once simply “real+actual”, is now “real+historical”, and numerous other meanings. For me, that’s why Khoi’s photograph works in black and white.

Likewise print has not been destroyed by the web, just repurposed. Again, referring back to the photo: people queued in the street to get a physical copy of the paper which declared Barack Obama to be the first African American President of the USA. From disposable news source to collectable item. I wonder how many of the people in that queue are like me: never buying a paper newspaper from one month to the next these days.

So the photo makes me feel happy and inspired because it’s what we are trying to do with our own venture, Scroll. We feel that the ideas and thoughts of our finest web designers, developers and thinkers deserve to be preserved for posterity in the form of a beautiful physical publication, because the look, the feel and the smell of the tangible will have its own unique significance. We were really happy with Scroll Number 1, and it’s been great to see copies of it go out to everywhere from Chennai to Malmo. Can’t wait to get started on Scroll Number 2.

• Douglas Crockford - Javascript Doesn’t Suck
• Derek Featherstone - Accessibility is More Than Compliance
• Daniel Burka - Digg’s Designer Divilges Design Details
• Douglas Crockford - Web Standards and Javascript
• Dmitry Baranovskiy - Talking about his Javascript Library, Raphael
• August de los Reyes - Scratching the Surface