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Teacher Fired for P2P Lecture
An anonymous reader writes "A teacher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, was forced to resign after a talk about P2P networks. You can read his side of the story on his blog." From the article: "The day before the conference, the Dean (pressured by the Spanish Recording Industry Association 'Promusicae' as I found out later, and he recognized himself in a quote to the national newspaper El Pais, and even the Motion Picture Association of America, as another newspaper quotes) tried to stop it by denying permission to use the scheduled venue. So I scheduled a second one, and that was denied again. And a third time. Finally I gave the conference on the university cafeteria, for 5 hours, in front of 150 people." Commentary on this story at BoingBoing as well.
He wasn't fired. He (claims he) was pressurised into resigning. I ain't making any judgement or saying anything else until I've heard an account of events from someone less close to the controversy.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Why should talking about P2P networks be considered illegal...
It's not, and it was never suggested that it was. What was suggested was that his lecture was so disliked by individuals in power, because they don't want people to get the idea that P2P systems have legitimate uses, that he was coerced into resigning. The penalty for not resigning would have been a total crackdown on his entire department. He chose to resign to save the department that pain. And in return for that "favor", his 5 years of teaching is not even being recognized.
and why was he forbidden in the first place?
See above. The university administration, under coercion by the Spanish Recording Industry Association and the MPAA (I think-- I didn't quite understand that bit), didn't want the population at large to see that P2P is a valid and legal tool, as that would damage their fight against piracy.
I can't believe how quickly these creatures have crawled from beneath the bridges and translated their near-unintelligble grunts to paper.
Mods, please mark "Troll" to anyone who posts anything like:
"He's a wuss, he backed down and quit."
or
"He resigned, he didn't get fired. TFA != Story Title"
Half-truth: He resigned.
Complete truth: He was forced to resign, and denounced by the university. The university said, "he only taught a few classes," when he'd been teaching full-time for 5 years!
This is BS, and censorship at its worst. I'm working on becoming a Computer Science professor, and this article makes me glad I don't live in Spain. Does anyone remember this from a few weeks ago? The RIAA wants just as much control over U.S. universities as the Spanish equivalent already has over theirs.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
His lecture wasn't denied twice, and if he was fired over it he'd have an open and shut wrongful termination suit, assuming that they have such a thing in Spain. His *request for a venue* was denied twice. So he gave the lecture in a place where he didn't have to ask for permission. As a trivial example, you get turned down twice trying to reserve a school field for your baseball game. So you have it at the next door park instead, where you don't have to ask.
I live in Spain. It's generally pretty cool, but one thing I really don't like about it is that there isn't the freedom of speech here that there is in the rest of Europe.
Politicians here sometimes sue members of the public for slander or libel. The last president did it (aznar). I like the UK, where you can happily calll tony blair a liar and not worry he's going to try to sue you for it!
The talk was outside the cafeteria and without microphones, so people were quite packed around Jorge, sitting on the floor, in order to hear what he was saying (cafeterias tend to be noisy places).
You can see some photos of the people here .
He indeed did.
The fact is that as a result he's got a real lot of publicity. And now he is on tour like a rock-star, LOL.
The situation is Spain is somewhat different as in the rest of the world:
We have a monster called SGAE:
It's kinda mixture of trade union, governmental department and private enterprise (?), which acts as a lobby group for EMI-Odeon Spain, as an obligatory trade-union (authors must pay fees to them so that they can see a cent from their IP), does music production as a private enterprise (it's partly responsible for the infamous "Latin Grammies"), fights against piracy, pirates copyrighted stuff from the spanish Wikipedia and at the same time runs an online music store, lobbys for non-related stuff such as an internet driving license and gets fees for public broadcast of public television and music bands which are not members of the SGAE.
MPAA should be concerned, as those guys also get payd for the IP of "unknown" artists, this means anybody which is potentially non-spaniard.
Now they are even getting money from a blank media 'tax' (30% of a CD or DVD's price), a 'tax' which is paid even by the Spanish administration itself (!)
So, we Spaniards can be cosidered a dumb bunch, but in matters of robbery and piracy those guys are Number One.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
This University, as most of the Spanish universities, is *Public*... We, the taxpayers pay the roles.
And those taxpayers are not specially fond of the SGAE / Promiscae, as they fees us for buying bunrable CD's for storing our pictures and also fees bars and the like for having a TV set, radio or HiFi equipment. Even when the spanish TV stations are either public or earns their income from publicity We are paying IP for TV Commarcials!
And the funniest of all this is that it's not the
TV stations which receive the money, nor the publicists, it's SGAE themselves.
The University we are talking about is also famouse for it's 'infamous' Dean, because of his engagement in nationalistic-linguistical discussions (Valencià vs. Català) and because of serving as a base for a particular nationalist group related to left-wing activities. So, it's not a very popular guy among he's colleagues.
So it's easy to understand that Cortell is now being invited to dozens of conferences in universities such as the UPM, one of Spains top-notch unis. Some of those conferences with RMS and Marcelo D'Elia Branco.
The Important Fact(TM): Spanish public opinion, even at a very basic non-geek level is clearly against SGAE and it's clones, it's the guy-from-the-street and the teenage school girl which are afected by the taxes and the bullying against P2P (a legal act, as far as we pay taxes for this). They perhaps don't know about the details, but they know for sure they are being robbed. JC could become a real media-star if things develop further in the direction of SGAE doing stupid moves.
One Thing I Forgot: The people at the SGAE are not specially smart, the are real *assholes* who could let Dubya seem intelligent. So people are much more upset as it would have been if they behaved like real loobyist instead of playing Bozo the clown.
Stay tuned, the war has just begun.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
It depends. First, not all US universities are on a tenure system (and never mind that the university in the article is in Spain).
Second, most new professors are years away from tenure.
Now, even for tenured professors at US schools, tenure isn't quite the shield you describe. For instance, if the professor is in a profit-center department (otherwise known as biology, computer science, or one of the other funded areas), if the professor isn't pulling in sufficient grants, the university can put them in a broom-closet like space where it's unlikely that they'll have the lab facilities to put together successful proposals (in biology, for instance, you usually need to have done most of the research before putting in funding -- grants are that competitive and agencies that risk averse).
Now, let's say that being put in a broom closet isn't bad enough. The university can get rid of tenured professors by eliminating the department.
Here's an example (not of retribution against tenured professsors, but simply of how a department closing can lead to selective firing of tenured professors). In 1990, Brandeis University had a linguistics department with 6 faculty, and I believe all six had tenure. The university decided to close the department to save money (at the time, the school was eating its endowment, not just interest on the money).
The university then made offers to 3 of the 6 professors (including Ray Jackendoff) to join other departments.
Effectively, 3 tenured professors were fired.
--Pat