Good News/Bad News In Brazil: Effort To Legalize Mashups... But Google Liable For User Actions
from the ah,-brazil dept
These two submissions came in one after the other, both having to do with Brazil, so I decided to just mix them together into a single post. Of course, it's a bit of a good news/bad news sorta thing. Let's start with the "bad news." Reader Stuart Waterman alerts us to the news that Google, owner of Orkut (the social network that is amazingly popular in Brazil for reasons still unclear) has been ordered to pay Formula 1 racer Rubens Barrichello $500,000 because there were fake profiles of him on Orkut. If this were the US, the case would have been tossed out on Section 230 grounds (noting that the service provider is not liable for the actions of users -- even though the users may be liable). But the Brazilian court apparently said that Google is, in fact, liable because it manages the site. If you're a service provider in Brazil, you just got a reason to lock down any sort of user-generated offering. Of course, this has happened before to some extent. Remember that a Brazilian court once tried to get YouTube shut down entirely due to an uploaded video that someone didn't like.On to the good news. Carl alerts us to the news that Brazil is considering a new copyright law that would legalize mashups and private copies. It would also allow the reproduction of out of print works. Of course, this is just the proposed bill, and you can expect that the entertainment industry is about to send in the lobbyist army to fix things up quickly. On the whole, though, Brazil has been quite good about recognizing the downsides to overaggressive copyright law. In fact, Gilberto Gil, a grammy-award winning musician and Brazil's former minister of culture, released his music under a Creative Commons license, and has regularly spoken out against abuses of intellectual property law. And, of course, we've seen stories about how forms of Brazilian music have thrived by taking advantage of the easy promotion and distribution allowed by file sharing. It would be nice if the country's laws were updated to reflect that.
Now, if only they could also change the laws to stop blaming service providers for the actions of users, then Brazil would get it all right this time.
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technobrega
Look up the technobrega (depending on spelling, tecno brega) brazillian community, where people remix other people's music daily and sell it on the street cheap. Many articles have covered this in the past.
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Re: technobrega
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Re: Re: technobrega
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If it is made to happen.
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Re: If it is made to happen.
Making Google responsible is akin to making the real-estate companies responsible if some crime is commited by someone that purchased a house from them.
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Suuure, I bet that only works for grammy-award winning musicians that are also former Ministers of Culture with... alliterative names. Thing.
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When something like this happens
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Brazil has broken patents before
Another case in point: Just go to the beach in Brazil and you will certainly see people pushing carts crowded with pirate CDs and DVDs. They play the music very loud and sell their stuff very cheap. They do not even try to hide or make an effort to go unseen. It is against the law, yes, but it is tolerated and has become ubiquitous.
I am curious to watch the next chapters of this "novela".
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Brazil has broken patents before
Another case in point: Just go to the beach in Brazil and you will certainly see people pushing carts crowded with pirate CDs and DVDs. They play the music very loud and sell their stuff very cheap. They do not even try to hide or make an effort to go unseen. It is against the law, yes, but it is tolerated and has become ubiquitous.
I am curious to watch the next chapters of this "novela".
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The law is most welcome, but I still can't see the openness
As for the good news, the devil is in the details. The passage from the original article (pt_BR) can be roughly translated as which is not impressive since it's common for the Brazilian laws to postpone the details to further laws. Notice that they first mentioned "decriminalization" of the private copy, which means that even having a copy of legally bought material is still illegal, before this "officialization" law comes into effect.
And it seems to me (I'm not a lawyer) that the "artistic mashups" are just the implementation of a fair use clause. My general impression is that this law, even if fully implemented, do not present any innovation but simply keeps up with international laws. To cover the ridiculous flaws of the current one.
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