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.

Comments

I don't get it

[shreevatsa]

I just don't get it. Why should talking about P2P networks be considered illegal, and why was he forbidden in the first place? Of course, after being forbidden once, he should have fought with the authorities and argued his case until he got permission, not ignored them and gone on to speak.

Re:I don't get it

[object88]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[Catbeller]

"Prostitution is harmful to health (STDs, violent pimps, emotional handicap of many prostitutes)."

CRIMINALIZED prostitution makes pimps and slaves, not legalized prostitution. Not to mention impoverished prostitutes. The emotional damage is caused by pimps, johns who can't be found or charged, police that don't care, and the fact that the women are de facto slaves with no escape route.

Legalized prostitution, done right, eliminates pimps, who exist outside the law, makes prostitutes rich, if they handle the money right, and empowers the woman rather than enslaves her, because she's a volunteer, being highly paid, rather than a chained and abused slave.

The major reason why women couldn't sell sex legally in our history is this: they'd be rich and independent, and that was NOT to be allowed by men, period. After all, they are the sole providers of a highly valued commodity.

Illegal prostitution gave men the ability to take the women's money away, in one form or another: by artificially lowering the price, by inserting male middlemen who could use their physical or political power to take a huge cut, and turning the business into a slave market.

This time they've gone too far.

[IO ERROR]

Just exactly why should I be buying music and movies and other such content from low-life snakes who pull stunts like this?

This guy goes out to talk about the legal uses of P2P networks, and the recording industry gets him fired. How exactly do they expect to convince people to buy their products rather than downloading them, if they do this sort of thing?

Re:This time they've gone too far.

[zoomba]

Why should you buy it? Well, don't, but if you want to posess it, you have to cough up the cash.

What they are doing is down-right vile, but disagreeing with corporate practices doesn't justify theft (obtaining something without proper payment).

They don't have to convince anyone of anything, because they are the legal owners of the content. And since that content is by no means essential to your life in any way shape or form, they can control it as they like.

Don't like how someone does business? Don't like their tactics? Boycott, get others to boycott... Protest... Write angry letters about it... whatever, but you can't really use it as a justification for theft.

I think the University in this case is a lot more at fault, because the industry could try and pressure or threaten audits or whatever, but they should have stood up to it. If I was in the administration I would have recorded every bit of communication with the industry groups and would have said "You even TRY to nail us for exercising our academic freedoms, this will go out all over every major media outlet and we'll make sure to take you to court over it"

Re:This time they've gone too far.

[russotto]

What you fail to realize is that the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc. have near-total control over the channels by which copyright law is changed. Their advantages are insurmountable. Trying to change a law which they support is like Pee Wee Herman trying to win a barehanded fight with Mike Tyson. So when you suggest "changing the law", you're suggesting an impossible course of action.

You present the choices as
1) STFU and Obey The law
2) Change the law through the accepted channels for doing so
3) Violate the law

and suggest 3) is undesirable. But because 2) is impossible, by opposing 3) you're supporting 1).

Re:This time they've gone too far.

[Maggott]

As the saying goes, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

The law won't be changed by any means that is within the reasonable capacities of the average Slashdotter. The majority of us have no political authority or influence. At all. I write letters to Orin Hatch every year, and sure enough, every year he turns around and tells everyone that my state is very supportive of putting a death penalty on owning an mp3 player. I vote in every presidential election, and every time the presidential candidate whom I voted for ends up with 0 votes *total*. (Which is why I like to slap people who say "Every Vote Counts!")

However, there are other ways to fight stupid and immoral laws, and one of them is to make sure they're unenforceable. Sure, that won't fix the law, but will fix it's effects and it's our only option. That's why the P2P arms race took place to begin with. We have no political authority, but we have a lot of combined technical knowhow.

Anybody knows that you don't win a battle by fighting the enemy where he is the strongest. Legislators have no reason to listen to us. They have hundreds of thousands of crisp, green reasons to listen to the **AA-holes. Lobbyists get paid handsome salaries to push their rhetoric 7 days a week for years at a time. We'd have to finance it out of our own pocket. Can you afford to take three straight years off and lobby for what you think is fair?

However, we control our own computers. Therefore, if we fight a war of software, the advantage goes to us. That's why they fight with more assheaded draconian laws whereas we fight with more robust and untrackable P2P apps. Sure, they sometimes try to write P2P tracking applications to find filesharers, and we sometimes write letters to our congresscowards. Neither one makes any appreciable dent. Each of us, therefore, tries to pull the battlefield closer to our respective power bases--we try to ensure they can't find filesharers to prosecute by making sure it's as big of a pain in the ass as possible, whereas they try to ensure they can find them by pushing laws that ensure they can demand any info they want out of ISPs at the drop of a hat.

What it comes down to is the same thing you've heard a million times before. Many people do not consider copyright infringement to be wrong. I know I don't. I think the whole concept is assheaded and there's abundant proof that every statement they make in defense of it is wrong at this point, ESPECIALLY in the entertainment industry. Likewise, there's people like you who swear up and down that it's theft. And since we cannot agree to disagree and just ignore each other, we fight.

Re:from the faux-news dept.

[h00pla]

Your comment is pointless. When high officials in most governments (cabinet members of the US administration, for example) are fired, they always legally 'resign'. The whole point of his blog posting, if you had bothered to read it, is that he was pressured to the point where he had to 'resign' - ie. he was fired.

Um

[mcc]

Welcome to Academia. That's how you fire people here.

Re:Techinical Point

[Danuvius]

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.

I'm quite certain that "having his contents confined under a pressure greater than that of the outside atmosphere" was not his reason for resigning.

Being pressured, however, may have have had something to do with it.

- The Word Police

Which just goes to show that...

[nurhussein]

nobody expects the Spanish (Recording Industry Association) inquisition!

Re:Which just goes to show that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet...

so I scheduled a second one, and that was denied again. And a third time.

...that one burnt down, fell over, then sank into the swamp...But the fourth one stayed up, and that's what your gonna get lad.

--AC

Re:Both sides?

[MightyMartian]

The fact that a university would try to stop such a lecture is beyond the pale. These are supposed to be institutions of academic freedom, not shills for the recording industry. It's a dark day for academia when cowardly administrators pull stunts like this.

Re:To make the lecture worth it...

[Rei]

But as far as we can tell, he didn't. He needed a "trackerless" lecture system.

All this talk about not being fired...

[smcd]

IANAL, but in most countries if you are forced into a position where you feel incorrectly pressured to resign, and you do resign, that is still grounds for an unfair dismissal case. He was effectively fired by the comments that were presented to him.

However, I do agree with some people that it would have been a clearer argument if he waited longer for the situation to develop more and made proper recordings of phone calls "discussing his problematic situation".

Mods: "he resigned, not fired" == troll

[guitaristx]

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.

Re:Two points:

[MightyMartian]

A university isn't the same as a business. The notion of academic freedom is central to a university, and the fact that a group of record companies could pressure a dean in this way shows that these guys have taken upon themselves far too much power. It was wrong, it was a violation of the notions of academic freedom, and I think the time is coming when we better sit down and figure out just how much power we want RIAA and its clones elsewhere in the world to have.

The point here is that he was CENSORED

[Spy der Mann]

Whether he resigned or was fired, or was pressured to resign is another matter. He was censored in his own university, for God's sake!

Re:from the faux-news dept.

[arkanes]

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.

Re:Resigned != Fired

[gowen]

Surely, if the Director is worried that an audit of his department will uncover unlicensed software, it's the Director and/or the IT guys who should be worrying about their jobs.

Academia != Business

[kurisuto]

Also, one should remember that this teacher was not approved to give the lecture and decided to go without permission and give it in the cafeteria. This would be grounds for inspecting someones future at most companies/universities.

At companies, yes. At universities, no.

In academia, knowledge moves forward as we argue for competing viewpoints. Universities can't function properly unless it's possible to argue for unpopular viewpoints without fear of reprisal. This is one of the major differences between academia and the business world.

I'm a faculty member myself. If I choose to stand up in a cafeteria and speak my mind on any subject I please, that is my right. I'm not required or expected to obtain anybody's approval or permission. The rules are that I can't be fired for this. If you disagree with my viewpoint, then the correct response is to use your own freedom to state your dissent.

Most folks in academia, both faculty and administration, understand this, agree with it strongly as a value, and go to considerable lengths to safeguard this ability. Those safeguards grossly broke down in this case.

Re:To make the lecture worth it...

[hackstraw]

...he should have ended it with "I'll probably be fired for this, so each of you go tell everybody you know." Or something to that effect.

Just as you should have preceded your comment with "I'll probably get modded down for this..." in order to get moderated higher.

See it by yourself

[AnonymousCoder]

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 .

Re:To make the lecture worth it...

[Optali]

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.