A conversation with Tony James of City Screen distributors regarding "Revengers", which has been invited to the Cambridge Festival. He'd prefer to screen it in the second week of the Festival so that I can participate in a debate on 35mm vs. digital projection, but for reasons shortly to be revealed, my preference is earlier...

We horse trade and settle on Friday 12 September, at 1900 hrs, for the Cambridge "Revengers" premiere (I promise a diatribe against digital projection on the night). Yer all invited.

Next day The Money Programme drives up to interview yours truly, not about DV projection, but about copyright issues. What does a film director know about copyright law? Too much, unfortunately. First-time directors, authors, and software writers sign away all rights, including the so-called inalienable rights of authors, to large corporations like Universal/Viviendi and Buena Vista/Disney.

The corporations own the copyright in perpetuity, and the actual intellectual property author receives nowt.

This to me is clearly what the law calls a contract between parties of unequal bargaining power. How can a poor musician or game designer or independent filmmaker get in the ring with Godzilla? Contracts made unfairly like this are supposed to be set aside.

Copyright law being fundamentally flawed and abused, like offshore banking laws and foreign residency laws, it should be immediately and thoroughly reformed! Copyrights and patents should benefit the individual, and promote competition and the creation of work. The pirates are the corporations who abuse their power (going so far as claiming to patent life forms! And essential drugs and crops!), not poor dim spotty boys copying Metallica tracks or downloading a videocam version of "Spider-Man".

Somehow, though a lot of musicians share the above sentiments, The Money Programme was unable to persuade any of them to voice them on TV. Hence the interview with mad boy, instead.

On the job front, Mr Okano, producer of Mike Yokohama - Private Eye, has sent me tapes of the first two episodes of the show (he wants me to direct one). One of them is familiarly rock-n-rolly, but the other is genuinely weird. Mike himself (Masatoshi Nagase) is vainglorious (he has a vast collection of ciggy lighters with sexy babes on them) but reacts like a real person when confronted with a rotting corpse... A cow wanders the streets of Yokohama, unexplained.

Have to do it, don't I? Mr Okano is welcome to my intellectual property if it can include Bunuelian cows...