PREVIOUSLY IN OPERATION APOCALYPSE:

Future Publishing and I are not friends. Everything started to go wrong in early 1998 - after I wrote a big feature on emulation for the company's Edge magazine, its then-editor Jason Brookes didn't manage to get round to paying for it for over a year. (It was a massive piece of about 20 pages, so it was a very substantial sum of money to be missing from my cashflow for so long.) Having tried repeatedly to get it paid, I finally had to go to the Small Claims Court, in a case Future didn't turn up to contest.

Having lost the case by default, Future also failed to pay the court-ordered judgement. Eventually I was forced to call up and warn them that I'd be sending in the court's bailiffs to collect the debt by force. This at last prompted Jane Ingham (wife of the then Managing Director, and senior management herself) to send a courier round that afternoon with a cheque. However, witnesses who were with her when she got the call have testified that she flew into a blind rage at these events, probably planting the seed of the grudge the company has held ever since.

I then didn't work for the company for over a year, but was invited by the editor of Arcade to contribute features and a regular column to the mag in 1999. I was pleased to accept, but one of the features was then substantially reprinted by a foreign edition of the magazine, which was in direct contravention of the terms of my contract. Future refused to uphold the terms of the contract, so I was forced to take them to court again for the reprint fees that they owed me. This time the company turned up to the hearing, but to no avail as the judge found in my favour in a matter of minutes, and they had to pay up.

Around about this time, I also discovered that Future had been illegally reprinting some of my earlier work for PC Gamer on the magazine's website. Once again they refused to pay the fees stipulated by the contract, and I was left with no option but to go back to court. Once more the judge found in my favour and made Future pay the reprint fees. Amazingly, they continued to reprint the work without the rights, and had to pay the reprint fees (several thousand pounds) twice more, before finally wising up and removing the work from the website.

By now, Future's editors had unsurprisingly been instructed by the management that they were no longer to offer me work. (Unsurprisingly, that is, if you're operating from the assumption that the firm's management were incompetent, petulant cretins who didn't like having their ineptitude and cynicism exposed in court. Future has a long and ongoing history of such bad treatment of writers, but most of them meekly accept it in order to keep the work coming, hence the company probably expected to simply get away with breaking its contracts.)

It was at this point that I discovered Future had also been illegally reprinting my work on PC Gamer's cover CDs, infringing my copyright on a staggering 900-odd separate instances and incurring a very large sum in reprint fees. (In the vicinity of £250,000 according to the terms of the contract, though I never expected to actually get anything like that sum.) After getting nowhere with the company, bar one incredibly insulting offer of less that 2% of what they owed me, I brought the case to court. But after losing several hearings, Future's lawyers eventually managed to derail it on a procedural technicality, having already spent far more money on their lawyers than I'd have accepted to actually settle the matter.

Several years passed without further progress, during which Future editors were forbidden from employing my services. However, when PC Zone was bought by Future from Dennis Publishing in 2004, Zone's editorial team extensively cleared my continued employment with their new publisher in London. However, after two months of carrying on with my regular Emu Zone and Indie Zone columns for the mag, this decision was seemingly over-ruled by the company's head office in Bath and my employment was terminated with immediate effect. (At the time of writing - February 2009 - I remain blacklisted.)

At that point, with nothing left to lose and having painstakingly gathered some vital evidence with the assistance of a few kind souls, I decided to have a final shot at bringing the copyright claim to court. This is the story of what happened next, in the form of a private blog I maintained for my friends and colleagues so that I wouldn't have to recite all the events separately a dozen times on MSN whenever something happened, and now made publicly available for the first time.