p2p news / p2pnet: The item below is by Inga Chernyak, current president of Free Culture @ NYU.

She’s was fired from her job as a legal clerk for expressing her opinions about DRM in a recent Village Voice article.

Stay tuned >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Code Warriors
By Inga Chernyak – Free Culture @ NYU

On January 10th 2006, the Village Voice ran an article called Code Warriors, detailing the efforts of the Free Culture movement, and those of the NYU chapter in particular.

The reporter, Carla Blumenkranz, quoted FC co-founder Fred Benenson explaining that our efforts are about ‘harm reduction’ she noted, quite aptly, that our mission is to aid in ‘minimizing penalties and maximizing opportunities, for artists and audiences alike.’

But what about the muckrakers? The conscientious objectors? The free culture activists? What protection from penalty do we have? What opportunity?

On Thursday, January 26th, I was fired from my job as a legal clerk at a medium sized IP law firm in midtown, NYC. When I inquired as to the reason, I was shown the Code Warriors article and told that my views about what the firm does were incompatible with…what the firm does. In so many words, I was told that the firm could no longer employ me due to my aberrant views on copyright law, although I was feverishly reassured of my right to hold those views. This assurance had relatively little value, however, as I was still fired for expressing the views in question.

As an active member of FreeCulture.org, and the president of the NYU chapter, I feel both obligated and prepared to stand behind the organization’s stance on where copyright is headed, and where it should be. I can not, in good conscience, renounce my beliefs in the hopes of gaining a rung on the corporate ladder. Still, I would like to say a few words in my own defense.

First, my taking a job in an IP firm was neither a subversive attempt to wreak havoc ‘from the inside’, nor a hypocritical denial of my Free Culture values. I was, and still am, a student interested in the scope of copyright law, and determined to pursue a career in the field. I wanted to gain an understanding both of the theory of copyright, which my work with FC provided, and its practice. The firm exposed me to the day to day operations of an IP lawyer, and I was nothing if not receptive to these lessons. I was baffled that someone saw fit to fire me over an expression of dissenting views. Doesn’t the field become richer when the wider spectrum of legal thought is explored and encouraged? Certainly, it is wrong to eject someone from their field of interest simply for exercising her first amendment rights and speaking out against the current.

What leapt out at me in rereading the article was my statement about breaking the law. I’d like to clarify that when I said ‘if there are laws I believe are wrong, I will break them,’ I was not making a general statement. FC does not endorse reckless lawbreaking; nor do I. I made that comment in the specific context of CD’s with DRM encryption: I would hold down the shift key and download my CD onto my laptop without a twinge of guilt toward the RIAA executive sitting in his corner office and ‘getting squeezed.’ That does not, however, make me an internal threat to a major law firm. And it’s a sad commentary on the autonomy of law firms that if one is rumored to represent Sony, it must keep its employment policy in check with the politics and business models of its clients.

Still, as a member of the Free Culture movement, and a young woman of 19 without children to support, I can afford to take this blow in the name of progress. The more people are made aware of this story, the less likely it is that firms will be able to maintain their practice of thought-policing without fear of public outcry.

If legal reform is going to happen if – Free Culture is to gain enough mastery of legal tools to bring about with action the change we are forever advocating – then its members cannot live and work in fear of the consequences of their free speech. FC will continue to dream of a world where culture and creativity thrive – free of unnecessary restraint – and I will continue to dream of the days when I am a legal scholar capable of enacting those dreams.

Also See:
detailing the efforts – Code Warriors, January 10, 2006

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