[Ecommerce] Brazil and IP

[Pedro de Paranaguá Moniz]

Brazil Reshapes Debate on Intellectual Property
Tue Feb 1, 2005 10:25 AM ET

By Terry Wade
SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil's president often gets criticized by
his old leftist friends for being conservative at home. But globally he has
reshaped the debate on intellectual property rights to reflect the needs of
poor nations.


In two years, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has forced the United Nations to
change its global patent system, irked Microsoft Corp. by scorning its
proprietary software, and annoyed recording studios by putting the music of
his dreadlocked culture minister online for free.


This year, the government will help 1 million middle-class families buy
computers loaded with open-source software, which is developed collectively.
It also will open 1,000 centers with free Internet access, running free
software, in poor neighborhoods.


Lula has accelerated a movement started by his predecessor, Fernando
Henrique Cardoso, who pressured big drug companies to cut prices in the late
1990s after threatening to break patents on anti-AIDS cocktails.


Brazil is now at the forefront of what may be a global shift in how
knowledge is produced and distributed. It has spurred a debate about what
inventions should get patents, becoming intellectual property.


Lula believes software, science and art should be governed by open-source
laws that would loosen up current standards.


But some drugmakers and entertainment companies say they are losing money
and the incentive to invest. They favor tighter patent rules and say they
need more protections to justify hefty research budgets and expansion into
developing countries such as China.


"Brazil is now the case study," said Eben Moglen, a law professor at
Columbia University in New York and general counsel of the Free Software
Foundation. "It will play a major role in intellectual property talks and is
going to provide an alternative example."


Along the way, Lula has forged a diverse set of allies, including companies
like Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., which support free
software and now derive much of their revenue from services and hardware.
There are also hippies-turned-digital-libertarians such as John Perry
Barlowe, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead band and founder of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation.


Government officials cheered this month when International Business Machines
Corp. released 500 patents to promote open-source technology.


"Sun, HP and IBM don't intimidate the Brazilian government, they collaborate
with us," said Sergio Amadeu, Lula's head of technology policy. He has
helped Brazil's expansive bureaucracy abandon Microsoft's costly Windows
operating system and adopt free alternatives like Linux instead.


Microsoft sued Amadeu last year for criticizing its closed-source business
model, but then dropped the charges. It declined to comment for this
article, but has said it is intensifying anti-piracy efforts.
This year, the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization, which
critics say traditionally has worked to tighten patent rules, is expected to
loosen them under a joint Argentine-Brazil initiative that could, for
example, improve access to patented AIDS drugs.


FREE THOUGHT, NOT FREE LUNCH


Advocates of open-source technology say society is morally obligated to
increase access to knowledge and that science produces better results faster
under a collaborative research model.


Brazil was the first nation requiring all software programs developed by
taxpayer funds to be licensed as open-source. That allows any individual or
company to use any program, so long as they make modified versions available
to everyone else.


"Free software is not synonymous with free lunch, but with free thought,"
said Ronaldo Lemos, a law professor at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas business
school in Rio de Janeiro who helped bring the licenses to Brazil.


Lula's culture minister, Gilberto Gil, has put at least one of his songs
online for free, betting that he will make more money from concerts if more
people have access to his music. In so doing, he provided an example for
artists wanting to sell directly to listeners and cut out record companies
in the middle.


Claudio Prado, Gil's head of efforts to change copyright rules for the arts,
says the dominant model is antiquated.


"The commercial life of music right now is six months to a year, but
copyrights can last 70 years, so lots of music gets stuck in the tomb of
forgotteness," he said. Freeing up old music for remixes could improve
earnings for artists, he said.


The United States has threatened to withdraw millions of dollars in trade
benefits for Brazil unless it more actively enforces anti-piracy rules
covering software and music. Brazil has agreed to do this, but says piracy
only exists because of proprietary software.


"Fight piracy," Amadeu said, "buy open-source software."

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Pedro de Paranagua Moniz
Masters in Law (LL.M.) candidate, class of 2004/2005
Queen Mary, University of London