Jorge Cortell Explained

Jorge Cortell is an activist and commentator known for his opposition to the concept of Intellectual Property. He was forced to resign as visiting professor of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) after delivering a talk in the university where he defended copyleft and P2P networks, and criticized copyright and patents, defying pressure from the dean and the MPAA who tried to censor his talk.

Work

Cortell, a serial entrepreneur, is currently founder and CEO of Kanteron systems a precision medicine software company whose story was picked up by Microsoft's news site. He's also a European Commission Member of the Expert Group on Venture Philanthropy and Social Investments.

Cortell has founded La Resistencia Digital and has actively cooperated with the Creative Commons and the FFII. He was president of the Oxford University Society Valencia and a member of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AI (Asociación de Internautas, mainly in Spanish) and Hispalinux.

Controversy

In May 2005 Spanish newspapers reported widely on an attempt by Universitat Politècnica de Valencia in Spain to block a talk by Cortell. The story was reportedly picked up by a large number of bloggers and Cortell resigned from his post at the University.

Cortell was "invited by the ETSIA Student Union and Linux Users' Group" to give a talk at the University analysing the legal use and benefits of the P2P networks, "even when dealing with copyrighted works" according to Cortell.[1] At the time Cortell was a teaching assistant on intellectual property at the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia. On May 4, 2005 he was forced to resign, after his very critical talk on Intellectual Property. Cortell eventually gave the talk at the university cafeteria.

Some months after the incident, the dean admitted that he had been pressured by the Spanish Recording Industry Association (Promusicae) in a quote to the national newspaper El País, and also by the MPAA as appeared in another newspaper.[2]

Speeches

In English

In Spanish

See also

References

  1. Web site: Spanish University achieves world fame for its crude attempt at censorship Technology Guardian Unlimited . 2008-06-22 . 2008-05-16 . https://web.archive.org/web/20080516215934/http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/05/22/spanish_university_achieves_world_fame_for_its_crude_attempt_at_censorship.html . live .
  2. Web site: Jorge Cortell blog . 2017-06-03 . 2017-05-05 . https://web.archive.org/web/20170505214019/http://blog.cortell.net/ . live .

External links

English

Spanish