Teacher Fired for P2P Lecture 749
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.
To make the lecture worth it... (Score:4, Insightful)
How are you going to suppress a n^x communication growth curve?
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:from the faux-news dept. (Score:1, Insightful)
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This time they've gone too far. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Resigned != Fired (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not trying to say what happened was at all right, but it does not help the argument to start stories with the claim that he was fired. Fudging the little facts to get attention always in the long run will be held against you, and your side will not be taken as seriously.
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.
Once again, I think what happened was a shame, but I also think that ignoring these facts is just unacceptable.
Both sides? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:from the faux-news dept. (Score:5, Insightful)
Um (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People are pussies. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Resigned = Fired (analogy) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:People are pussies. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes its better to wait to make your case...
Spending the next 6 months in prison to make your point ( or dead ) even if you are right, isn't cool. Especially when postponing your 'statement' a little will keep you outside.
Proper timing is everything. Especially when you have a life to lead, and a family to support.
And in this case he's getting his word out, and saved his financial butt in the process.
Re:from the faux-news dept. (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably should have fought a little more (Score:1, Insightful)
Because now he has no leverage. This sucks, and I sympathize but what can be done? If he still had his job, for example it would be a man standing up for his principles and at the same time a man who has a right to his job. That's the kind of thing you can try to milk.
Re:Both sides? (Score:5, Insightful)
No FS Here (Score:3, Insightful)
No courage, No freedom (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:from the faux-news dept. (Score:2, Insightful)
Forced to resign under threat of being Fired.
Duh.
You see, in non-McDonald level jobs, being fired is a serious impediment to getting hired elsewhere. However, if you "resign", you can BS your next employer as to the reason.
Re:from the faux-news dept. (Score:2, Insightful)
Now which would sound better to future prospective employers?.
All this talk about not being fired... (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
They get pulled into a quiet room and told all would be best if they left the university.
Then they "resign", but it's tenamount to firing.
-nB
Re:from the faux-news dept. (Score:1, Insightful)
The firing is legit - he clearly disobeyed a very clear issue. Most would agree that denying the request was wrong (for some definition of wrong), but that doesn't mean he should ignore his employer.
It doesn't matter WHY they say it, they pay his salary, he either listens or goes elsewhere.
Re:Two points: (Score:5, Insightful)
The point here is that he was CENSORED (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:5, Insightful)
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"
No, the firing is NOT legitimate (Score:5, Insightful)
The proud history of universities is that they are supposed to be places for the sharing of information, not places for censorship. A university is generally considered to be part of a public trust of information, unlike a privately held for profit corporation. The charter of a university is usually not-for-profit and to spread and increase knowledge.
Good universities have professors who say scandalous things and - if they are well thought out - keep their jobs (usually unless they are personally attacking more senior faculty). By going ahead and getting forced to resign, I believe he did exactly what he intended - proved his university isn't interested in education and doesn't deserve to exist. (Unless of course they come back and remedy it)
Furthermore it is part of the mandate of a professor to do things like this - they are supposed to be making the world a better place, and they have a burden to that - the same way a doctor is supposed to help people even if they work for a corporation. They have BOTH responsibilities.
Re:from the faux-news dept. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um (Score:2, Insightful)
Spain != U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot of comments here about how he should have gotten tenure, spoke to a union, in the U.S pressured resignation == firing, in the U.S. pressured resignation != firing, etc. How about someone from Spain actually chiming in? Is there a tenure system in Spanish universities? Teacher's union?
Academic freedom ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Physics professors routinely give lectures that are, essentially, instructions for making a nuclear weapon. Chemistry professors often teach how to create the energetic reactions that most people call explosions. Engineering professors teach the methods that can cause buildings to fall down. No one suggests that these topics must not be taught. Indeed, there is significant intellectual content in each of these topics. Nuclear power, how to avoid explosions, and how to avoid falling buildings, all require knowledge that might be misused.
The idea of a p2p network is useful for many purposes other than distribution of copyrighted material. Distribution of public-domain materials, software upgrades and patches, government documents, and contributed materials are all legitimate. The protocols and technology that are used in current p2p implementations is a legitimate topic of study, so that researchers can design improved versions for future use. Methods to discover and disable the illegal copying of copyright material, without disabling the legal publishing of contributed public-domain material, is another legitimate area for research.
Of course, it is possible that some of the people attending these lectures had the intention of using the material to violate the law. But, it is also possible that some of the students who take physics, chemistry, or engineering courses have the intention of using that material to violate other laws. If we suppress every topic that might be used to do harm, there will not be much left in our universities.
Re:Mods: "he resigned, not fired" == troll (Score:2, Insightful)
One.
And he's not exactly the most impartial source from which to infer the "Complete Truth" is he?
Christ, with people this willing to accept any information without considering how unbiased or reputable the source, no wonder Fox News is so popular in the USA.
Software license audits (Score:5, Insightful)
Also interesting, the teacher was only going to share his opinion on why using P2P may be legal. In America at least we are generally pretty protective of the right to debate ideas. The MPAA and its spanish counterparts though appear to be opposed to this concept.
If you're going to be an academic institution it would seem prudent to move away from software and support of groups that are unwilling to even allow different opinions to be expressed on a college compus about a topic. We used to call that type of exchange education.
Academia != Business (Score:5, Insightful)
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:This time they've gone too far. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think of this issue like people who don't eat meat because of moral reasons. Discounting the fanatics, they don't go out and steal the cows away so they can be treated better.
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno, but I'd guess someone who can't spell "tantamount" doesn't have a lot of experience of working in a university.
An inability to spell some words correctly, or being dyslexic, does not indicate that someone is incapable of having a good argument. Nor does it indicate that he's making things up.
Even if it did, you should make allowance for the fact that in an international forum the poster could be working in his second language.
And as I seem to be the only poster here that has actually read the article, I'll quote the relevant passage:
He says that this is why he resigned, which I would say is tantamount to being fired.
Re:Nice Spin (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently you cannot see the bigger picture:
The issue is:
What motivation did the administration have to have "wishes" of that nature? Do you really think it was the administration alone? No, the administration was affected by an external force - the M.A.F.I.A. (See other posts in this topic for what that means).
As the administrations true onus is to provide an environment for learning, and not just to learn those OfficiallyApproved(TM) topics, but anything that would advance human knowledge, then the administration was acting against it's own charter.
Quit spouting the line of the true conformist.
[If] You don't start fighting for your freedom, you're not going to have much left.
He's in the Slashdot's Front Page now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:5, Insightful)
The game is *fixed*, and you can't win playing a fixed game.
It matters! (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it does matter. Most western societies consider colleges and universities to be places where the exchange of ideas should be paramount. Any censorship in this regard should be cause for great concern.
Many are pointing out that this guy was not a professor, so what's the big deal? The answer is that this was in connection to a discussion about IP law. If they can't discuss the specifics of the applications of technology, then what are they there for? Shall we wait for an exalted professor to get chastised for saying the same thing before we get worked up over this?
No, this is not good news...
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:2, Insightful)
This would be different if it weren't a luxury item, but because it is, you don't have much of a leg to stand on.
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:2, Insightful)
What theft are you talking about? In Spain is legal to copy music (or whatever) as long as there is no profit and no damage to anybody.
That was what Cortell wanted to say in his conference.
Re:Academia != Business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And yet some big corporations are working with (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:3, Insightful)
If Slashdotters are unhappy with the way copyright law works, they need to work to change copyright law-- NOT simply pirate the products they want anyway which 1) doesn't accomplish anything because the lawmakers will never hear the Slashdotter's side fo the story and 2) changes you from a 'protestor' to a 'criminal.' (And yes, you're a 'criminal' regardless of how immoral you think the law is.)
I'm sick of this (as Snopes.com puts it) SLACKtivism. If you want to change the world, you have to WORK AT IT. You can't sit on your ass, clicking "download now" on Kazaa and expect the copyright laws to miraculously change to the laws you'd prefer, it just won't happen.
Re:Um (Score:3, Insightful)
That you believe the researcher in question actually was formally fired, but is not telling the truth about it?
Or that he was either fired or pressured to resign, but may be misrepresenting the reason?
Or that you are so affronted by the original poster's misspellings that you are going to take issue with anything he says or anyone else says in response to him?
By the way, I concur with others that it is poor form to mock others for their misspellings on Slashdot, but I won't take you to task for it. I'd just like to remind you that you don't necessarily know why the person happened to misspell something. You might have inadvertently done the equivalent of making fun of somebody for having a stutter, or speaking with a foreign accent. Even if it was mere carelessness, it's not so terribly unforgiveable is it? After all these are Slashdot postings, not dissertations.
Re:To make the lecture worth it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Freedom of speech in Spain (Score:2, Insightful)
its not slander or libel when its true.
/me knows nothing of british politics or of blair's lying-ness.
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:In America (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a perfect example of the point being made. You can say just about anything here, no matter how loony or (in this case) unpatriotic. You might be called a traitor for speaking out against the war, but you will not be prosecuted as one.
This is not an example of suppression of distasteful speech; it's an example of its exercise.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's this defeatist attitude that makes your prophecy of being unable to fix things self-fulfilling.
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:3, Insightful)
"What they are doing is down-right vile, but disagreeing with corporate practices doesn't justify theft (obtaining something without proper payment)."
OH NO i am depriving some company of PERCIEVED LOSSES. stop being a tool. i guess if i watch a dvd at my friends house i have to go out and buy another copy right? otherwise its stealing via public performance. right?
boycotts and angry letters do a whole lotta nothing when the side you are fighting is evil. they will stop at nothign to dominate and you would have us to ask them to please stop. when the revolution comes, i wonder who will be up against the wall. the ones who fight, or the ones who write letters.
oh and BTW you cant re define words to make them whatever you want mmmkay?
Re:Open Source full time! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that theft does have an actual meaning, and in every definition, it implies someone losing something.
The act of theft has two consequences: 1- the owner loses his property, and 2- the thieve gains some property he didn't own.
If 2- doesn't happen, then it's not theft.
If, for example, I go to your house and break all your windows, then, 1- follows, you lost your property (the windows), but 2- doesn't, because I gained nothing. Then I would not be a thieve, I would be a mad man that breaks windows, a window destroyer, an aggresor, or I don't know what.
If 1- doesn't happen, then it's not theft.
If I go to a river, and get a bucket of water, then I haven't paid for it. I now own the water, and I didn't pay. 2- did happen, and 1- didn't.
Then I am not a thieve.
There's no way you can define theft as "gaining property without paying", without being inconsistent with the world, and outlawing most things that people do, like breathing.
Plus, I won't start talking about capitalism, and how your statement only applies in a consumers society, but the concept theft applies in any society, other than real socialism.
The real issue here is cloning. When you make a copy, 2- happens, but 1- doesn't.
You can talk about lost revenue, but lots of things we do make companies lose revenue, and they don't sue us in result.
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:This time they've gone too far. (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright infringement is not theft. They are legally two different things. One is copying an abstract idea while the other involves taking physical property. Copyright infringement is a civil action in most jurisdictions and most circumstances. Theft is a criminal action.
There is some definate problems with how Copyright is being handled lately. This going to be an even bigger problem in the future. For one example of the problems we will be facing, check out Kim Stanley Robinson's "Elephant's Memory". To summarise the issue- there is a finite number of combinations that make up a particular art form. With the never ending copyright durations, there is a dwindling supply of new combinations to create new works of art. How do you create a new song when every five note chord you might come up with is already copyrighted?
By ignoring copyright now, we force things to be changed. Look how Napster has given rise to various legal and semilegal digital music distribution services. Do you really think there would have been an iTunes or iPods if there was no Napster?
Re:Freedom of speech in Spain (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course calling Tony Blair a liar would be slander, libel applies to more permanent forms (/. comments are probably somewhere in between), but truth is a defence to all forms of defamation I would have thought, because you can't defame the guilty almost by definition.
The reason Tony Blair probably doesn't sue is that "liar" is a broad term in English, you'd probably only need to prove he lied once on something. And much as I think he is a generally good chap he is still a politician with lips that move.
I don't believe there is much difference between UK, Spanish or American law on these topics, but then IANAL.
Re:Um (Score:3, Insightful)
In the rest of the world the authors are not forced to be member of an organization to be able to get paid.
In the rest of the world authors and music industry are not members of the same institution
In the rest of the world such a private company would not be albe to tax consumers, neither they would be legally considered a non-profit organization.
Think about the MPAA doing all it's lobbying and bullying, plus having the status of an obligatory trade union for musicians, plus being vice-presided by the CEO of AOL/Time-Warner, plus getting money as a governmental institution, appart from it's IP-holding business. This is the crazy part about it: It's a all-in-one !
Re:In America (Score:3, Insightful)
You might be fired from your job, denied permits and licenses, and be harassed short of prosecution, and otherwise persecuted for it. No, you can't be prosecuted, but so long as the non-judicial punishment is under the radar that's just fne.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't feel your conclusion is very solid here. Are you saying prostitution is bad because it allows men to easily obtain sex? If your wife/girlfriend is likely to be emotionally hurt because you slept with a protitute, that's because you made the choice to cheat. If you're so inclined, I find it more likely than not that you'll end up cheating at some point anyway. The participants of the actual relationship are responsible for their own fidelity, period.
If sex for sale is all it takes to stimulate betrayal, something wasn't right to begin with.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
We're talking at cross-purposes so there's no disagreement - just misunderstanding. I fully agree that if sex for sale caused a betrayal then there was something wrong to begin with. I was a little harsh in implying that men will always cheat given the opportunity.
What I was trying to do was determine why prostitutes were held in contempt and I disagreed with the original poster that it was because men didn't want women to be rich and independent. I think a lot of the cultural dislike of prostitutes was enforced by women. Women with boyfriends don't like women without. That's not true of course, but do you see what I'm getting at? Prostitutes are the ultimate "single" women.
Anyway, regardless of the merits of that argument, I really don't see liberal prostitution as a means of undermining male patriarchy as the original poster said. I can see what she's getting at in that it's a woman's freedom to choose that is denied in atrong patriarchy, but the misconception is that the prostitute is making free choices. Other than some dabbling university students with escort agencies, there is no choice.
I'm certainly not saying prostitution is bad because it provides easy sex for men (might stop them invading other countries all the time). I believe that it was considered bad because of this, and was often considered bad because of this, by women.
I think prostitution is bad because it hurts the prostitute herself. Keeping prostitution criminalized makes things worse, I think, but legalizing it doesn't make it lovely and fluffy.
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not theft at all. You've been brainwashed into thinking that. Theft requires that you take someone's possession away and deny them access to that. It's not piracy either. That requires theft, rape and pillage on the high seas.
What copying music does is increase its availability without compensating the record industry. They lose revenue. Never mind that you weren't going to buy it in the first place, you've devalued its worth to the record company by making it available without having to go through them.
Should it be illegal? Well I personally think that's arguable since I don't believe that restricting access to information or art is good for society in the long run. Should the penalties be large sums of money and years in jail? Hell no! That should be reserved for rapists and murders. Making the penalty for copying songs the same as for drug trafficing devalues prison as a form of punishment and crowds jails with people who shouldn't be there (which the tax payer then foots the bill for).
I have no love of or sympathy for record companies. They're leeches whose time is gone but who don't want to let go...and as for the artists yes they should be compensated but not with inordinate amounts of cash, and at the expense of people being fined into the stone age and jailed.
Re:This time they've gone too far. (Score:1, Insightful)
How much money did you give him?
How many people did you convince to give him money?
How many people did you canvas outside Tower Records in Salt Lake (assuming there is one) with a sign saying "Donate $10 to the Campaign to Reduce CD Prices" or some such?
If you could convince everyone who bought music in Utah to contribute the cost of one more CD to Sen. Hatch's campaign, would he not roll over and be your bitch?
You, and many other Slashdotters, seem to forget that the multibilliondollar media industry that funds the **AA gets its multple billions of dollars from the citizens of the USA, who could just as easily buy the Congressional votes of their elected representatives. So often we hear that the 535 people on Capitol Hill are whores - well, as was mentioned elsewhere, prostitutes surrender their independence - they have to go to bed with whoever pays them.
It is apparent that merely electing someone to office in the US does not indebt them to the electorate, but rather to those whose contributions allowed the campaign that influenced that electorate. Accept the plutocratic nature of your system and use it to your advantage. The RIAA has shareholders, artists, and employees to pay, as well as purchasing the loyalty of the legislature. They cannot match the contributions of individuals in numbers.