What he outlined goes to the heart of the ongoing controversy concerning Brighton Festival's two "fringes".

The Brighton Fringe Festival has been in existence since 1997, as an independent arts festival running concurrently with the International Brighton Festival. It was set up along the lines of the Edinburgh model.

The Brighton Festival has always had an "umbrella" within its festival, publicised as a listings guide within its main programme. For 2002, the Brighton Festival wanted to re-brand its umbrella as the Fringe but many artists and companies associated with the festival objected (as we did), so the Brighton Festival hit upon the title Brighton Open. We considered this quite appropriate as it did not involve the name Fringe and also reflected that by far the greatest input comes from artists' open houses.

However, under the directorship of Nick Dodds, the Brighton Festival raised the issue of the name again.

What subsequently happened must go down as a blatant act of sabotage. Despite the protestations of almost all concerned, the Brighton Festival decided to once again rebrand the umbrella, this time as Brighton Festival Fringe.

Our primary reasons for the Brighton Festival not using the word "fringe" are because we have been operating under that name since 1997 (so would potentially suffer commercially) and because it would create an enormous amount of confusion to the detriment of both organisations and all those who perform and show their work.

The Brighton Festival organisers also bought the domain names brightonfringe.co.uk and brightonfringe.com, an abbreviation of our festival name.

Mr Phillips went on to say that box-office sales for his event are down this year compared to his similar event last year. The confusion is also amply demonstrated by a piece in the same edition of The Argus ("Composers plan colourful performance") in which the first sentence reads: "Composers are making final preparations for a performance at the Brighton Fringe Festival." Later on in the same piece, the organiser of the event in question says: "The extensive involvement of New Music Brighton members in the festival, both the Brighton Festival and the Brighton Festival Fringe."

The event in question is not one of ours but readers would surely be confused by reading such an article. We have documented dozens of examples of confusion and mistaken identity.

By the time the festivities are over, I expect to have hundreds. I wouldn't want to hazard a guess at the true scale of the confusion.

There is an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion, all created by the Brighton Festival which we can only assume purposefully attempted to take our name and, with it, credit for our past achievements. If you would like to read more about this, there has been a special web site set up: www. brightonfringe.info

-Jeff Hemmings and Helen Medland, directors, Brighton Fringe Festival