File-share defender fired over TV show

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.

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.

"As far as I was concerned they knew about it. They're an IT company with IT professionals, it wouldn't have taken five minutes on Google to find out," he said, adding that several colleagues had discussed the case with him prior to his dismissal.