Last year, we reported on Brazil’s copyright law forbidding the use of DRM to block fair use. It appeared at the time that Brazil was developing a very progressive and open stance on copyright reform, even licensing the contents of its state website under Creative Commons. There was even a movement to legalize file sharing.
However, after a new administration was elected, Brazil’s stance on copyright seems to have gone through a screeching U-turn. Mike Masnick at Techdirt reports that the country’s new Culture Minister ordered the removal of the CC license from the website shortly after taking office, saying “We will discuss copyright reform when the time comes.” A protest letter from a coalition of Brazilians does not seem to have done much good, because Brazil is now considering a “cybercrime” bill that could not only criminalize file sharing, it could also criminalize ripping a CD to your computer.
Some countries, such as Britain, have not yet explicitly legalized CD-ripping, but it seems to be widely recognized as a form of fair use that would probably stand up in court if it were challenged. (This is probably why nobody has legally challenged it since the RIAA’s big loss to Diamond Multimedia that opened the age of the MP3 player—they don’t want to set that legal precedent explicitly.) It is hard to imagine any country outright criminalizing such a widely-accepted use of media.
Perhaps this is just the first step on Brazil’s road to becoming a totalitarian bureaucratic dystopia.
I wouldn’t worry about it. Fill out form 27b-stroke-6 and it’ll all be fine.