p2pnet - rss feed: Alex Hanff saga continues
p2pnet.net News:- Movie studio pseudo-cop organization the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is harassing Alex Hanff, a UK software trainer who’s also the owner of DVDR-Core, for, it says, “helping people download copyrighted films via P2P technology”.
The DVDR-Core server was once located in the US and that was enough justification for the studios to assert that Hanff is, “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States federal court by virtue of … engaging in BitTorrent activities through a US Internet Service Provider, among other reasons”.
The fact he’s an English citizen living in England and subject to British laws, and the fact he’d shut the server down before the MPAA even started complaining, doesn’t mean a thing to the cartel. It’s looking for as much exposure as it can get in its claims that file sharing is driving it and its workers to ruin.
Hanff and DVDR-Core were perfect as fresh media fodder.
When he was interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight for part of its broadcast on the Supreme Court Grokster v MGM ruling, he’d only just started a new job with Aldcliffe Computer Systems in Lancashire and then Pow! He was sacked out of the blue because he’d said things that angered Aldcliffe’s parent company, the Tribal Group.
‘Everything was fine’
“Since the action started I have lost my job based on my opinions on the actions of the MPAA (which is a breach of my employment rights and my human rights, which clearly state all people are entitled to an opinion and have the right to impart their opinion) which I believe are socially irresponsible and are causing irrevocable harm to society, as well as placing families into poverty,” Hanff says in a letter to California governor Arnold Schwartzenneger, which p2pnet published for the first time yesterday.
His managers also knew about the Newsnight interview and allowed him to leave work early on Monday, he says.
And, “When I first went to work on Tuesday, everything was fine,” he told the Guardian Unlimited.
“The whole office was supportive. At lunchtime the technical director took me to the conference room and dismissed me. He said he had been told that his presence within the company could count against it when bidding for big government contracts.”
A manager from the Tribal Group later phoned, he said, “to improve the offer of one week’s redundancy pay to three months,” the Guardian Unlimited goes on. “He refused and plans to take legal action, claiming that he was sacked for a ‘philosophical belief’ in contravention of employment law and the European Human Rights Act.
“Tribal Group said in a statement: ‘The decision to terminate [Mr Hanff’s] employment was made in order to defend our legitimate business interests. Mr Hanff has declared that he is opposed to copyright and intellectual property laws. Since much of our business is based around the protection of our copyright and intellectual property, we consider our dismissal of Mr Hanff entirely justified and appropriate’.”
Two other MPAA victims
But Hanff isn’t about to cave in.
“The day we start to put families into poverty for having a point of view, is the day we become what we fought two World Wars to avoid,” he told p2pnet. “The reason we have Human Rights that cover the freedom of expression and the right to a point of view, is to protect us from action that is ultimately fascist.
“As a democratic society, the right to have an opinion and the right to impart that opinion is required at a definitive level and is the very foundations our society is built on. Once you remove those foundations, it is likely that everything will collapse and eventually we will have no rights at all. Furthermore, the financial interests of a corporation should NEVER be put before the welfare of the people.”
And his local party rep is making sure his MP and MEP are aware of the fact he was fired, and for what reason.
Nor is Hanff alone as a UK citizen being attacked by a shady US organization with no legal jurisdiction in Britain.
Ex-RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) mouthpiece Matt ‘The Dentist‘ Oppenheim is heading things up for the MPAA in a different entertainment cartel attack on Kevin Reid and Ian Hawthorn.
The two run a perfectly legal web site which, as Hawthorn said in a recent letter to British party leaders and major media outlets, acts, “merely as a search engine for material relating to popular media such as films, etc. In essence, we do no more than is already done by popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, etc.”
And yet, “We have received several telephone threats from … the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), threatening to hold us liable under American law for punitive damages. They initially demanded $150 million to settle the matter, threatening that if we didn’t pay, they would identify us to the American Courts and would use this to ruin our lives back in the UK.”
Stay tuned.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
first time - Hanff to Schwartzenneger, p2pnet, June 27, 2005
Guardian Unlimited - File-share defender fired over TV show, July 4, 2005
The Dentist - Kevin Reid and Ian Hawthorn, p2pnet, May 4, 2005
July 4th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
They’ll crush him like a bug…but nice story.
July 4th, 2005 at 9:35 pm
we’re with you, man
July 5th, 2005 at 10:34 am
It’s a sign of trouble for a company which does not value the diversity of opinions and fresh ideas that its employees can bring to it.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:53 am
I think he’s a dick! Twisting an interpretation of his own views to break the law. Throw the key away when dealing with kind of pompous garbage and put effort into really making the world a better place.