In the earliest time of movie making there was one person, who stand behind the camera, cranking, giving advices to the actors in front. He was in a big stress and so he had a brillant idea. He ordered one of the actors to arrange the scene. This was an importeant moment of film history: The invention of a brandnew job : film director . An who created it? Of coures a DOP and no one else.

I think we should not forget this matter of fact , if we demand our rights of co-authorship .

We have to be aware, that the we do this in a period, where human rights in general are treated very bad especially the fundamental one. The neoliberal spirit, which tooks place everyvery , has no interest to share yield . Working people all over the world earn less and less money and live in everydays fear to loose their jobs.

Fear is a tried mean of oppression. The threat to become destroyed economical and to live in poverty make people more and more renouncing of their fundamental rights. There is really no good time demanding moral states. We have to keep this in mind in proceeding our efforts.

Who except us can be interested in our state of authors? Not many. The opponents act well organized all over the world , develop strategic plans and special means to force through their part of view. So we cannot count with the symphaty of the public, because the industry asserts constantly:

"Regarding more authors utilization will become more and more impossile".

This is not true, because in practice it concerns only the second step of utilization. (royalities)

Audiovisual products get more and more expensive, because of increasing share of authors and other creatives.

This is also not true because the big money at the moment goes to the industry and not to the authors. Dop`s don`t want people to pay more for Film and TV.

It would hardly be necessary, because the cake is voluminous enough and creatives are mainly excluded from it.

The fact, that dops get remunerations in several European countries should be helpful to bring all of us on the same level in copyright. Solidarity and consequency, which was missed in the last years, has to be mobilized now. The suggestion coming from Austria to approach established national collecting societies and using their refusements as openers" for legal actions at the European authorities, has to be realized immediatly.

Changing inhuman working conditions, as our great collegue and friend Conrad Hall demanded, is indead a big task we have to deal with . Like in copyright activities solidarity is of fundamental importance in this field. As long as the well established and strong among us don`t stand for this target because they fear personal troubles and disadvantages, absolutly nothing will change!

Unfortunatly engagement and civil courage are not in fashion at this moment.

But if we dónt use them now, what will be the future of our profession?

Kurt Brazda
Vienna, 9th of November 2004