Brazil, Stanford Program Ally on Free-Culture Hot Spots
SAN FRANCISCO -- Brazil and a Stanford University program are collaborating to extend on an international basis Brazil’s campaign to set up community technology centers for free culture, said Claudio Prado, the digital policy coordinator in the country’s ministry of culture. Since 2003 the government of president Luiz da Silva has put $8 million into creating 600 so-called Pontos de Cultura -- “hotspots where, through a combination of re-purposed hardware, satellite web access, open source software, and the presence of skilled community activists, grassroots communities have developed through building a common social, cultural, and political” cyberspace, says the Web site of the Stanford Humanities Lab. This month the lab began partnering with the Brazilian project.
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The resulting works are covered by a “mashup” Brazilian version of the Creative Commons some-rights-reserved license, Prado said Monday at the MusicTech Summit. “People who have never heard of copyright, have never heard of downloading… start uploading. They are coming up with some fantastic things.” The government watches what bubbles up rather than trying to supply operating models, he said. “We want to make sure if an artist decides that his work is free, his rights should not be limited by some kind of technology device in the hardware.” Brazilian young people simply want their music “to be heard,” Prado said. Making money is at most a secondary aim, he said. Digital collaboration is a natural extension of the cooperation at the heart of daily life in favelas, Brazil’s huge slums, Prado said.
Prado’s goal is to help the cultural hot spots program “move from Brazil to other places and be autonomous from government,” he said. He seeks “to get new partners and new people to come in,” he said without elaborating. Prado was headed to a Humanities Lab workshop to “explore how people from Stanford, the Bay Area research community, and beyond may become involved,” the Web site said.
Prado promotes Brazil’s copyright policy worldwide in private and public forums, including the World Intellectual Property Organization, he said. Brazil’s goal in WIPO is to gain recognition of individuals’ rights alongside those of companies, he said. Prado works with activists -- “anarchists in the sense of people who don’t believe in central power,” as he called them.
The U.S. hasn’t pressed Brazil on its digital copyright policy, which favors sharing and remixes, but that probably will change, Prado said. Even with the attention he said its efforts are attracting, Brazil is experiencing an “under the mist revolution… bottom up,” and the U.S. “hasn’t bothered us so far” because it hasn’t “taken us seriously,” Prado said. “But we know the empire strikes back.” The Bush administration has a “monolithic” view and seeks in vain to regulate the Internet with international cooperation, he said.
Prado called the market in Brazil “the right of companies to make a lot of money on top of people” who can’t, indicating that he thinks the term “pirates” applies best “to people who make a lot of money,” such as record labels, not to “kids” who experiment with music. A major government role is to regulate “the greed of companies,” Prado said. But he acknowledged that “the big companies are not doing very well anymore.”
Prado called his “very weird job” the only national- government position of its kind. He never aspired to enter government but landed there because of a long friendship with culture minister and world-renowned musician Gilberto Gil, he said. Their views were shaped in the 1960s, guided by The Politics of Ecstasy, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary’s 1968 book on psychedelic drugs and the counterculture, Prado said. Gil wants to free his songs of copyright restrictions, but even though the most of his recordings haven’t made money, “Warner Brothers won’t let him,” Prado said. “He decided to go into politics when he learned he didn’t own his own work.”
The ultimate goals are sweeping, Prado said. “We should use legal bridges to find out new ways we can reorganize society.”