Brazil's Government Wants Twitter To Turn Over Data On Users Who Mocked Victim Of Assassination Attempt

from the criminalizing-jerks dept

World governments continue to believe Twitter is the best conduit for oppression. Twitter is the main target of Turkish president Recep Erdogan's loutish attempts to mute dissent and criticism. Other countries find Twitter's speedy delivery of punchy content a constant threat to their power and routinely block their citizens' access to the microblogging site.

Twitter is too compliant too often, so the cycle of dissent-crushing continues. Twitter will push back now and then but, like other service providers, often places market share ahead of protecting users from their encroaching governments.

Brazil's government was hoping to speak to a more compliant Twitter when complaining about mean tweets, but the call appears to have been answered by the steelier side of its international relations unit.

A judge on Brazil’s top electoral court on Friday ordered Twitter to hand over data of 16 users who celebrated via tweets the near-fatal assassination attempt two weeks ago of far-right, poll-leading presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro.'

Judge Carlos Horbach rejected an appeal from Twitter regarding the request and gave two days for the company to hand over the data, which was requested by the Bolsonaro campaign. The users could potentially face charges under Brazil’s hate crime laws.

Twitter did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the judicial order in its second-biggest market in terms of number of users.

Celebrating the stabbing of a presidential candidate may be tasteless and rude, but it shouldn't be a crime. But in Brazil, it's apparently illegal to celebrate the wounding of politicians. This is the danger of hate crime laws -- ones often written with an eye on defending the powerless, but deployed in service of the powerful far more often. Bolsonaro may not be president, but he's ahead in the polls so he's only a vote away from being Brazil's leader. A politician with 30 years of service under his belt is the very definition of "powerful."

Twitter is pushing back this time and appears to have some experience challenging government overreach. If it continues to refuse to turn over the data, it will face fines of $12,000/day, presumably in perpetuity. In addition, the Brazilian version of contempt of court charges could result in the arrest of Brazil-based Twitter execs.

It's another reminder that it's good to be king -- or at least a step away from the top job. The laws written to serve the public will protect you, even if your personal security team can't.

Filed Under: brazil, data, jair bolsonaro, privacy, stabbing, subpoena
Companies: twitter

Offering Good Legal Options Works: Interest In Netflix Outpaces Pirate Options In Brazil

from the no-kidding dept

If you were to have asked anyone in the film industry or the MPAA about the country of Brazil within the past decade, it's quite likely that they would have thrown their hands into the air and told you what a detestable hotbed of piracy and copyright infringement the nation was. And, hey, they would have been right. The simple fact of the matter is that there are some countries where the downloading and streaming of films and television is more common than others. The obvious next question to ask for any business interested in reversing this trend would be: why? The answer always seemed obvious to me: there is a customer demand that the legitimate options are not fulfilling. Many in film and television instead decried a lack of strict copyright enforcement and everybody wanting everything for free, instead.

Well, with a recent study published by Google, it seems we are getting an answer as to who answered that question correctly, and it wasn't Hollywood. The trend in Brazil, beginning in 2016 when streaming services were expanded in the country, is the stagnation of piracy and the adoption of legitimate streaming services.

While there’s still a long way to go, it’s interesting to hear the progress that’s being made not only in the West but also piracy hotspots further afield. This week, Brazil’s Exame reported on a new study published by Google.

Focused on movies, one of its key findings is that local consumer interest in Netflix is now greater than pirate alternatives including torrents, streaming, and apps. As illustrated in the image below, the tipping point took place early November 2016, when searches for Netflix overtook those for unauthorized platforms.

There's really only one lesson to be learned here. If an industry meets customer demand in a way that is convenient, enjoyable, and in a way that provides good value, the hassle and illegality of piracy are too much of a bother. The best way to defeat piracy is by embracing new business models, and that mantra is exemplified in a company like Netflix, which revolutionized how video content is consumed across the globe. Even if Brazil's appetite for piracy remains steady, as it has, media companies can simply out-compete it in terms of eyeballs by being awesome.

“We’re not lowering piracy but this does show how relevant the [Netflix] brand is when it comes to offering content online,” Google Brazil’s market intelligence chief Sérgio Tejido told Exame.

If an industry views piracy as completely irrelevant other than its use as a market research tool for what the public wants, then all that matters is the success of Netflix and its peers. The pirates are going to pirate, but meanwhile an entire new customer base and revenue stream has been uncovered in a country lamented as a pirate haven. And the popularity of Netflix in the country is on the upswing largely because of how great the service is.

Importantly, nine out of ten users in Brazil said they were “extremely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the service, up from 79% in the previous year. An impressive 66% of subscribers said that they were “not at all likely to cancel”, a welcome statistics for a company pumping billions into making its own content and increasingly protecting it, in the face of persistent pirate competition.

Make a great product and give it to consumers in the way they want at a good value and suddenly piracy isn't the threat it was made out to be. That's been the Techdirt formula for years. It's great to see it in action.

Filed Under: brazil, copyright, culture, licensed service, piracy
Companies: netflix

Senior Brazilian Court Says 'Right To Be Forgotten' Cannot Be Imposed On Search Engines

from the memorable-ruling dept

Brazil's Superior Court of Justice (STJ), the highest court for non-constitutional questions of federal law, has ruled that the "right to be forgotten" -- strictly speaking, the right to be delisted from search results -- cannot be imposed upon Google or other search engines. As a post on Global Voices explains:

According to judiciary rapporteur Nancy Andrighi, the ruling stated that forcing search engines to adjudicate removal requests and remove certain links from search results would give too much responsibility to search engines, effectively making them into digital censors.

We don't know the details of the case, which was held "under secrecy of justice" according to the article. But the Global Voices post points out that there's another important "right to be forgotten" decision coming up in Brazil, this time from the country's top court:

Brazil's Supreme Court -- which is a higher court than the STJ -- will soon hear a different case on the right to be forgotten involving TV Globo, Brazil's largest TV network. The case is brought by relatives of Aida Cury, an 18-year-old girl who was brutally raped and assassinated in 1958, in a case that was never resolved. In 2008 TV Globo broadcasted a story on the case. The relatives sued the network, arguing that the story 'unearthed a painful time for the family' and their lawyers invoked the thesis of the "right to be forgotten".

If Brazil's Supreme Court joins the STJ in refusing to acknowledge a "right to be forgotten" here, this would place the country at odds with South Korea, which has decided to follow the EU in introducing this new right. If nothing else, that discrepancy would demonstrate that it is not a foregone conclusion that other jurisdictions will adopt this particular European innovation.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: brazil, data protection, free speech, right to be forgotten, search engines
Companies: google

Brazilian Court Agrees Wikipedia Can Use Publicly-Available Personal Information For An Article

from the wow,-you-don't-say dept

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about a victory in the courts for Creative Commons licenses, noting that such judgments were still rather few and far between. That's unfortunate, in the sense that some people still think CC licensing is weird, rarely-used or even invalid. The situation regarding Wikipedia is similar. Even though it has been around for 15 years -- just like Creative Commons -- it too suffers from continuing doubts about its aims and methods, and a relative dearth of legal cases helping to clarify the status of both.

Here's one from Brazil, which has recently been settled in favour of Wikipedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. It concerns the Brazilian musician Rosanah Fienngo, who had brought a lawsuit objecting to information about her personal life being included on her Portuguese Wikipedia page. Wikimedia pointed out:

The Portuguese Wikipedia article about Ms. Fienngo contained information about her as a notable public figure in Brazil. This information included some details of her personal life, but this information was derived from public sources, most of which Ms. Fienngo had provided herself, such as an interview Ms. Fienngo gave to the gossip website O Fuxico.

You would have thought that someone who had provided details about her personal life to a gossip website would (a) realize that people might pass on that public information -- that's how gossip works -- and (b) be grateful to those who spread details she herself had chosen to make public. Fortunately, the judge seems to have understood the situation:

The court stated that although the information available on her Wikipedia page concerned her private life, Ms. Fienngo had already disclosed that information to the media herself, so its inclusion on Wikipedia was not an invasion of her privacy.

It's ridiculous that it required a court case to establish that, but the good news is the judgment should help to discourage others from bringing more such suits. Well, probably. Unfortunately, another similarity between the Brazilian Wikipedia case and the earlier Creative Commons one is that Ms. Fienngo could make an appeal, although Wikimedia notes:

We believe that the decision was strong enough that community members should feel free to make editorial decisions to write articles like the one about Ms. Fienngo.

Let's hope they're right.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: brazil, private information, public information, rosanah fienngo
Companies: wikimedia, wikipedia

For The Third Time, Whatsapp Blocked (And Then Unblocked) By Brazilian Judges For Failing To Decrypt

from the we've-seen-this-before dept

What's up with Brazilian judges not understanding Whatsapp? In the last few months, judges keep freaking out that Whatsapp messages are end to end encrypted, and that the company is unable to decrypt them at all. On Tuesday morning, the news broke that Judge Daniela Barbosa had ordered Whatsapp blocked yet again, along with a $50,000 per day fine until it decrypts information that it cannot decrypt. While various ISPs set about blocking the extremely popular app, as with the previous times, it took only a few hours for a higher court to suspend Barbosa's ruling, and to make the app available again.

Of course, this is the third time that Brazilian courts have done this particular dance. It happened in December and again in May. And who can forget the time in March where a Brazilian judge ordered a Facebook exec arrested over the same issue (Facebook owns Whatsapp).

Whatsapp's founder/CEO Jan Koum called the latest news "shocking," noting how these blocks had been rejected "loudly" in the past. Given how widespread this news was, as well as the basic architecture of Whatsapp, making it impossible to decrypt messages, it makes you wonder just what Brazilian judges think they're accomplishing each time they do this. Do they think they're sending a message to Facebook/Whatsapp? If anything, it just looks Brazil and its judicial system seem backwards and out of touch.

Filed Under: brazil, daniela barbosa, encryption, judges
Companies: facebook, whatsapp

Why Encryption Bans Won't Work: Brazil Government's WhatsApp Block Just Sends Users To Other Encrypted Platforms

from the generating-more-business-for-competitors dept

The battle against encryption being fought valiantly stupidly by the FBI, a few law enforcement figureheads, and a handful of legislators is an unwinnable war. Just ask Brazil, where the government has blocked WhatsApp repeatedly in an effort to force it to comply with demands for information. The problem is that WhatsApp now utilizes end-to-end encryption for all messages, meaning WhatsApp cannot provide any information about message content no matter how badly the Brazilian government wants it.

So Brazil blocks WhatsApp periodically and everyone wanting a secure messaging platform simply routes around it.

Several rival apps that offer encrypted messaging services reported a surge in Brazilian sign-ups, which highlights how the growing ubiquity of private messaging apps makes it hard to stop people from using them.

Both Telegram and Viber reported surges in new signups, with Telegram saying it had gained more than one million new Brazilian users. And this is happening every time the government decides it's going to kick WhatsApp off the internet.

The same thing will happen with any of the proposed encryption bans currently making their way through various legislative entities. Bans have been proposed in both California and New York. If imposed, the only thing they'll guarantee is that locals will be purchasing phones in another state.

And those who don't feel comfortable with the end result of other efforts like Dianne Feinstein's will opt to use communication platforms/cell phone service providers who haven't caved to government demands that companies hold the encryption keys.

FBI director James Comey seems to believe he can make the world unite in the banning of encryption. This is apparently based on his abject failure to convince even a majority of US legislators that bans and backdoors are a good idea.

As long as there are options, people will seek them out. That's the only guaranteed outcome. And the more a government tries to clamp down, the further it separates itself from any usable information, like communications metadata and access to subscriber information. Once you've pushed citizens to using platforms located in other jurisdictions, your powers become severely diluted. It would be better to just accept the growing shift to encryption and explore other options that don't involve slamming your head repeatedly into an immovable force.

And, it must be pointed out that people have communicated securely for years without the government claiming it should have access to every private conversation and the contents of every mailed letter. Just because texting has replaced phone calls and letters doesn't mean the government is somehow entitled to this new wealth of communications. Just because it's easier to obtain in bulk doesn't mean it's the end of the investigative line when encryption takes that opportunity away. James Comey should stop worrying about the "smart people" in tech companies and spend more time with the "smart people" in law enforcement and find out why they're not doing more to alleviate the situation.

Filed Under: alternatives, blocking encryption, brazil, encryption, going dark, messaging
Companies: telegram, viber, whatsapp

Brazil Has To Pause Adoption Of Broadband Usage Caps After Consumers Revolt

from the pay-more-for-the-same-service! dept

It appears to have only taken the better part of the last decade, but we finally appear to be reaching the point where people have finally realized that broadband caps aren't about managing congestion, they're about turf protection. Here in the States, companies like Suddenlink, Comcast AT&T and CenturyLink have all rushed toward adopting caps and overage fees as not only a pointed weapon against streaming video competitors like Netflix, but as a nifty way to charge more money than ever for a product that's actually getting cheaper and cheaper to provide.

The same thing is happening in Brazil, where ISPs have convinced telecom regulator Anatel it's absolutely necessary to shift from flat-rate pricing to metered usage lest the Internet explodes (it's surely just coincidental that Netflix's popularity is soaring). And, like here in the States, regulators have been more than happy to help repeat broadband industry claims that you need low caps and overage fees because it's just not possible to continue offering unlimited broadband:

"...The president of the telecom watchdog Joao Resende told journalists at a press event yesterday that it is unlikely that Anatel will challenge operators, since "not all models can accommodate an unlimited service provision and also because the networks won't be able to cater for everybody." Resende added that operators are guilty for making users think that unlimited service provision would be available indefinitely.

The problem is that most consumers and press outlets are perfectly capable of reading earnings reports, and realize that flat-rate broadband has been perfectly sustainable, and that caps and overage fees are really just massive price hikes on uncompetitive markets:

"Companies argue that caps are needed to prevent network congestion, but continued investment in infrastructure to cope with forecast demand consistently announced by these same firms in recent years suggest that usage caps really have nothing to do with network congestion issues. In addition, bandwidth costs for telcos largely remain fixed, and despite major growth in their user base, providers such as Vivo are paying less today for raw bandwidth than they were a decade ago. So really, there is no technical or economic justification for a cap."

Anatel had been pondering regulation that would have codified this shift toward metered usage, but the unprecedented amount of public backlash appears to have the regulator re-thinking its agenda:

"According to Anatel, the decision to let service providers introduce the data limits has now been stalled due to the several complaints that were received, and will remain on hold until the proposals for the new plans have been submitted by operators and analyzed by the watchdog."

That doesn't mean Anatel won't ignore consumers anyway, but it does highlight how consumer activism and revolt can at the very least still give telecom regulators pause. Instead of letting ISPs wage war on innovative services with unnecessary usage caps, less beholden regulators have realized their focus should be on improving broadband competition, which in turn improves speeds (Akamai currently ranks Brazil 80th in overall broadband speed) but organically punishes neutrality violators and prevents carriers from being able to pummel captive markets with such glorified rate hikes.

Filed Under: anatel, brazil, broadband, data caps, usage caps

Once Again All Of Whatsapp Is Being Blocked In Brazil Because A Judge Is Upset It Won't Turn Over Data

from the whats-up-brazil? dept

Brazilian judges are apparently not very big fans of the popular messaging app Whatsapp, which is owned by Facebook (but run independently). Judge Marcel Montalvao has ordered the app blocked entirely across Brazil, because Whatsapp has refused to provide data (which it likely does not have) to help out with a drug investigation. Any phone companies that don't block Whatsapp will be fined about $143,000 per day.

If this sounds familiar, it's because we went through this back in December in another case with another judge. And, of course, in March a Facebook (not Whatsapp) exec was arrested over a similar issue in a different case. When Whatsapp again refused to turn over information, because it could not, the judge had the exec arrested (another judge freed the exec pretty quickly).

Once again, Whatsapp points out that it's cooperated as much as possible:

“After cooperating to the full extent of our ability with the local courts, we are disappointed a judge in Sergipe decided yet again to order the block of WhatsApp in Brazil,” WhatsApp said in a statement. “This decision punishes more than 100 million Brazilians who rely on our service to communicate, run their businesses, and more, in order to force us to turn over information we repeatedly said we don’t have.”

The order is shutting down Whatsapp for 72 hours, but considering just how widely the app is used there (it is basically the way many Brazilians communicate) the impact is pretty massive. As Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman over at the Intercept note, this is a ridiculous move that harms many people, but is also a sign of what's to come as governments continue to freak out over encrypted communications:

It is stunning to watch a single judge instantly shut down a primary means of online communication for the world’s fifth-largest country. The two Brazilian communication experts in the NYT wrote of the first WhatsApp shutdown: “the judge’s action was reckless and represents a potentially longer-term threat to the freedoms of Brazilians.” But there is no question that is just a sign of what is to come for countries far from Brazil: there will undoubtedly be similar battles in numerous countries around the world over what rights companies have to offer privacy protections to their users.

Filed Under: blocked, brazil, encryption, going dark, messaging
Companies: facebook, whatsapp

Brazilian Media Giant Realizes It Can Use The DMCA To Censor Criticism Of Its Coverage

from the what-a-wonderful-censorship-tool dept

As we've explained over and over again, copyright and censorship go hand in hand. People who want to censor seem to love the power that copyright conveys on them. Take, for example, the Brazilian media giant Globo. As you may have heard, there's a big political fight down in Brazil, as the Congress there looks to impeach the President, Dilma Rousseff. It's a big political mess, made even more ridiculous by the fact that many of the leading voices looking to impeach Rousseff have themselves been indicted for corruption or are being investigated for corruption. Last week, David Miranda wrote an article for the Guardian, arguing that the whole thing is political, and that the corruption claim against Rousseff is just a pretext for an opposing party to gain power. In that article, he blames the major media properties in Brazil for supporting the fiction in pushing an anti-Rousseff story.

The story of Brazil’s political crisis, and the rapidly changing global perception of it, begins with its national media. The country’s dominant broadcast and print outlets are owned by a tiny handful of Brazil’s richest families, and are steadfastly conservative. For decades, those media outlets have been used to agitate for the Brazilian rich, ensuring that severe wealth inequality (and the political inequality that results) remains firmly in place.

Indeed, most of today’s largest media outlets – that appear respectable to outsiders – supported the 1964 military coup that ushered in two decades of rightwing dictatorship and further enriched the nation’s oligarchs. This key historical event still casts a shadow over the country’s identity and politics. Those corporations – led by the multiple media arms of the Globo organisation – heralded that coup as a noble blow against a corrupt, democratically elected liberal government. Sound familiar?

Globo TV was apparently not happy with that and asked the Guardian to post its response, written by the company's Chair of the Editiorial Board, Joao Roberto Marinho, who apparently is the heir to the Globo empire.

Miranda then responded to Marinho over at the Intercept, to show why Globo has been extremely biased in pushing one side of the story in Brazil. Miranda goes through Globo's somewhat sordid history as a propaganda arm, and then goes point for point debunking Marinho's claims. Towards the end he tries to show just how one-sided Globo's coverage has been:

For more than a year, one Globo-owned Epoca magazine cover after the next used manipulative, demonizing art to incite the public in favor of impeachment. The Twitter feeds of Globo’s stars — both news and entertainment — are filled every day with pro-impeachment propaganda. Even when Jornal Nacional tries to deny that it is placing its heavy finger on the scale in favor of pro-impeachment protests, it cannot help itself: It glorifies those pro-impeachment protests and gives them far more airtime than their pro-democracy counterparts:

After this, he linked to a video demonstrating all of this... but soon after his article went up, that video became this: Yup. Globo suddenly decided to make a copyright claim on the video that was being used in an article demonstrating how its coverage has been incredibly biased. That video had been up for months before that with no problem, but just a little while after it was included in Miranda's article it was gone. Poof.

And people still want to claim copyright isn't regularly used as a tool for censorship?

Yes, the content in the video is content from Globo. But it's not taking it down over any concern over licensing issues or "piracy." It issued the takedown to clearly hide the video from the public viewing Miranda's article. It is purely a censorship move, and copyright is just a convenient tool. Thankfully, others have been reuploading the videos elsewhere, but just think what will happen if the legacy entertainment industry is successful in pushing a "notice and staydown" regime? This kind of censorship will become much, much more effective.

Filed Under: brazil, censorship, copyright, criticism, david miranda, dilma rousseff, dmca, impeachment, joao roberto marinho
Companies: globo, youtube