Support P2P, Get Your Ass Fired

July 5th, 2005 · No Comments

Guy in mask behind keyboard

The Guardian has an interesting piece on some dude getting fired after appearing on TV and giving his (pro) p2p views on a BBC program called Newsnight:

A software engineer and champion of peer-to-peer file sharing is planning legal action after being sacked for expressing his views on BBC’s Newsnight.

Alex Hanff, 31, was just a week into his job as a consultant at Aldcliffe Computer Systems in Lancaster when he was invited on to last Monday’s edition to comment on the US supreme court’s decision to hold software companies responsible for permitting illegal file sharing over their networks.

Article continues
The next day managers told him he was fired because the opinions he expressed on the show were “inappropriate”, Mr Hanff claimed yesterday.

Newsnight interviewed him because in March he was served with legal papers by the Motion Picture Association of America for running a website called DVD-Core that pointed users to files of movies, some illegally copied, distributed using BitTorrent file-sharing software. It was this his employer objected to, saying he should have disclosed it when interviewed.

Mr Hanff had shut down the site on his own volition the previous December. He argued that the case, which he plans to fight, was a civil case in a foreign country that had yet to begin. “When they dismissed me they said I should have disclosed it to them. A civil case that hasn’t started yet is nothing to do with them,” he said yesterday.

This just isn’t cool on so many levels. It scares me to think of how much control some corporations want over your private life.