A few years ago, a major copyright reform in Brazil seemed imminent. What happened? On the Creative Commons Brazil blog, Mariana Giorgetti Valente and Pedro Nicoletti Mizukami have an excellent post on the complicated history of copyright reform in Brazil:

In December 2007, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture — then under Minister Gilberto Gil’s administration — started the National Copyright Law Forum, a series of seminars across the country with the participation of lawyers, researchers, artists and industry representatives, with the goal of gathering information and pave the way for a copyright reform process. Based on these events, and other closed and open meetings with different stakeholders, the Ministry of Justice prepared a draft copyright reform bill, which was submitted to public consultation in 2010.

The consultation took place in an online platform similar to that used for the Marco Civil consultation on Internet regulation. Comments could be submitted on an article by article basis, and the analysis of almost 8,000 contributions resulted in a project that was considerable superior to current law, with greater attention to public interest issues, an expanded list of copyright exceptions — including a general clause, the permission to circumvent DRM/TPMs in certain conditions, checks on the collective management of copyright (a serious problem in Brazil), and the explicit recognition that copyright may be limited by consumer protection law, antitrust law, as well as human rights.

When Dilma Rousseff was elected the 36th President of Brazil, however, the copyright reform process suffered its first major setback. To succeed Juca Ferreira as her Minister of Culture, Rousseff chose Ana de Hollanda, a singer with close ties to the recording industry and ECAD — the central office for collecting societies in Brazil, one of the greatest adversaries of the draft bill. Indicative of how different her approach to copyright policy would be, one of the first measures de Hollanda took as Minister was to remove Creative Commons licensing from the Ministry of Culture’s website. Soon after, de Hollanda replaced most of the staff of the Ministry’s Intellectual Rights Directorship (Diretoria de Direitos Intelectuais), and mostly stalled the reform process, despite concluding a revision of the text.

Read the full post.