Hello all!
Subject is not 100% related to Wikimedia, but definitely important for the
future of projects like ours.
Marco civil da Internet (the Brazilian internet civil rights bill) has just
been approved by the Brazilian
Congress<http://oglobo.globo.com/pais/camara-aprova-marco-civil-da-inter…59>.
Now the Senate still needs to approve it.
The bill has been recently supported
<http://www.webfoundation.org/2014/03/marco-civil-statement-of-support-from-sir-tim-berners-lee/>by
Sir Tim Berners-Lee.[1]
Back in 2007, several Brazilian civil society organizations started to
fight against bills which were about to be approved creating a penal law
over certain uses of internet.
This fight led the Brazilian government to build, together with other
Brazilian organizations, a request for comment/collaborative
platform<http://culturadigital.br/marcocivil/sobre/>[2] for the
creation of a civil rights bill for the internet. Contributions
were gathered together and a first draft was proposed for another round of
public comments on 2010.
A first draft was negotiated within the government in 2011. A lot of lobby
over the Congress was carried out especially against the articles about net
neutrality and internet service providers liability (both by
telecommunication companies and the intellectual property industries, but
mainly the former - they wanted all internet service providers to be
obliged to remove content under a simple notification claiming the content
should be removed. Internet civil rights activists claimed for the need of
a justice decision about that).
The case of NSA spying
Brazil<http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show…
the government become fonder of the Marco Civil bill, fostering its
approval in the Congress.
Since the first draft of the bill, some aspects were lost, but the bill
remains important and mostly beneficial to internet rights in my opinion.
It's been a long process, with lots of threats to this initiative, but in
the end the balance seems good. Good the the freedom of expression and good
for net neutrality.
Best regards
Oona
[1]
http://www.webfoundation.org/2014/03/marco-civil-statement-of-support-from-…
[2]
http://culturadigital.br/marcocivil/sobre/
[3]
http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-st…
Other links:
a. Research about media piracy - the Brazilian chapter brings the history
of the Marco Civil da Internet by 2010. -
http://piracy.americanassembly.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/MPEE-PDF-1.0.…
b.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/01/brazil-legislate-online-civil-…
c.
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/02/19/amendments-to-brazils-bill-of-righ…
d.
https://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/03/12/brazil-marcocivil-bill-of-rights/
e.
https://twitter.com/marcocivil