The Azeredo Law -- named after the senator most supporting it and who's backed up by the banks, certification companies and the culture industry lobbies -- this bill is full of conceptual ambiguities and technical inaccuracies. It's a proposal that creates proibitions and penaulties in the brazilian side of the internet before guarantee the basic rights of its use and development.

It's politically supported in the supposed war against hatred crimes (such as paedophilia and racism) but addresses a profitable future to digital certification and copyright enforcement.

If it states that is going to combat falsification and virtual theft increasing security on banks, companies and institutions (and, in fact, it seens to make cracker's actions a bit harder), it also means that it encloses the user's privacy and records his/her steps while surfing the net.

In consonance with the recent european data retention iniciatives and with the Cybercrime Convention, the Azeredo bill tries to apply the model of fear and vigilance in the daily internet usage in Brazil.

It shall not to pass. For the legitimacy of anonymity and for the free networks of interchange and knowledge!

What it is about

This bill is a a huge threat on civil rights as it is something like a combo of FISA ammendment, a Data Retention Directive and a DMCA. The most important points on it are:

  • The Digital Rights Management and Information Security section.
  • The Data Retention and Whistleblower section.

The Digital Rights Management and Information Security section stipulates penalties for circunventing any system -- not just breaking a computer network but also things such as unblocking a cellphone that are expressely restricted -- and for transfering "data or information" without authorization.

The Data Retention and Whistleblower section first obligues the internet access providers to "maintain, in a controlled and secure environment, for a period of three years, with the purpose of providing it to a formalized public investigation, data of electronic origin address, time, date and GMT reference of the connection made through the computer network and provide it exclusively to investigatory authority by means of a prior judicial order".

This section also obligues the internet access providers to "inform, confidentially, the competent authority, about received complaints containing evidence of the perpretation of a crime [...] whose perpetration has occurred within the computer network under its responsibility", what in pratice can make the providers stablish content filtering to preemptively avoid trouble with the law.

History

This bill started in 1999 in the Congress. At the time it didn't attracted too much attention by the big business lobbies and just in 2003 it was sent to the Senate for appreciation. Then it was gradually being edited to fulfill the lobbies' needs. At the same time, the civil society, privacy and peer-to-peer network advocates started to raise concerns and pressure the Senate against the bill.

Ignoring the huge claim to stop the whole process, the Senate approved their draft and sent it back in July to the Congress, where it can just be partially or fully approved, without any other change.

Even among neoliberals the issue is very controversial: if some of those are in favour of the bill because they still support the old business model of intelectual property enforcement, other liberals such as the Creative Commons supporters are against because it prejudices new business models such as the web 2.0.

This controversy and the major public pressure which is fully against the bill were major factors which made some senators apply some important (although insuficient) changes in the original text and what made possible a public audition to happen.

Read more about the Azeredo Law