Brazil's New Culture Minister Dumps Creative Commons From Ministry's Website

from the sharing-is-not-caring? dept

Fri, Feb 11th 2011 9:24am — Mike Masnick

At times, we've covered the various goings-on in Brazil as the country has attempted to reform its outdated copyright laws. We've seen some very interesting proposals, including plans to punish the hindering of fair use or the public domain, and a separate proposal to explicitly legalize file sharing, in exchange for a small levy. That said, the government seems to be getting pulled in a variety of different directions on this issue, and the latest appears to be pissing off a lot of people. That's, in part, due to the new Culture Minister, Ana de Hollanda, ordering that the Creative Commons license on the Ministry's website be removed. When questioned about this, her response was:

"We will discuss copyright reform when the time comes."

Except, of course, a Creative Commons license has nothing to do with copyright reform. Keeping it up there makes no difference to copyright reform. It's too bad that it looks like some Brazilian politicians appear to be moving away from more reasonable approaches than what we have now.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: brazil, copyright, creative commons

8 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

The eejit (profile), 11 Feb 2011 @ 9:00am

I wonder how much 'lobbying' happened?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 9:36am
  
  Re:
  Maybe quite a bit, as this new Minister seemingly has ties with ECAD (a representative of various copyright holders' associations which has the legal authority to charge for public executions of songs and such) and in more than one occasion has answered to questions concerning this CC matter with the same words as ECAD's official opinion about CC adoption.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Gwiz (profile), 11 Feb 2011 @ 1:26pm
    
    Re: Re:
    ....legal authority to charge for public executions of songs and such)...
    
    They can charge for people murdering songs in public?
    
    They should go to my local bar on Karaoke Night, they'd make a ton.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - Anonymous Coward, 14 Feb 2011 @ 9:02am
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      Hey, I'm not a native speaker, gimme a break. :p
      
      What it's called when a song is played in public, either by playback or live?
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
      - Gwiz (profile), 15 Feb 2011 @ 8:15am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re:
        Hey, I'm not a native speaker, gimme a break. :p
        
        I wasn't really getting on you about the language - it just struck me as funny put that way.
        
        Usually it's phrased as "public performance" I believe.
        [ link to this | view in chronology ]
cgt (profile), 11 Feb 2011 @ 11:26am

Just removing the text/image stating that the website is licensed under a CC license, doesn't actually revoke the license.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 11:38am
  
  Re:
  It shouldn't, though it can revoke the license on future site changes.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - cgt (profile), 11 Feb 2011 @ 11:49am
    
    Re: Re:
    True
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]