Professor claims he was fired for supporting P2P

A PROFESSOR at a Spanish University claims he was fired for conducting a lecture in favour of the legal use of P2P.

Jorge Cortell, who was invited to give a conference about the legality of P2P networks, says that the Spanish Recording Industry Association, leaned on the Design Engineering Superior College.

He said they threatened the school with software audits, if the lecture was not called off. The conference date had to be changed because the University kept finding other uses for the room where it was being held. Cortell eventually held the conference in a University café and was promptly fired, he says.

The University had a novel approach to dealing with the media attention in the case. It just denied that he had ever worked at the University, which meant that those people who had been attending his lectures for five years must have had a bit of a shock.

Although most of his comments are in Spanish, he has written his side of the story here in English, if you look at the 20 May, 2005.

There is an English blog penned by one of his supporters here. There is also a picture of the lecture that got him fired. µ