Polyrhythmic Patents

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Forget those song-swapping teenagers targeted by music industry lawsuits. Critics of the restrictive, heavy-handed approach to intellectual property (IP) favored by large corporations now have a new champion: Brazil.

Yes, the country. From music to medicine, software to agriculture, the world's fifth-largest nation has become a laboratory for policies that seek to expand the information commons, charting a legal course that is driving copyright and patent holders to distraction and raising new questions about the rights of poor countries to determine their own path toward development.

'A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property,' says Brazil's minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, in Wired (Nov. 2004). In addition to his government job, Gil is one of Brazil's biggest pop stars. He has made a fortune from his own music copyrights, yet he rails against the 'fundamentalists of absolute property control' -- the corporations and governments that, left unchecked, would lock up all information, from literature to DNA, and require users to pay royalties for every scrap.

Last year Gil threw his government's support behind the Creative Commons licensing system, a more flexible form of copyright designed by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig. These 'some rights reserved' licenses allow artists to specify allowable free uses, such as digital sampling and noncommercial file sharing, for their work. Putting his own money where his mouth is, Gil also offered to re-release several of his old hit songs under the license, free for anyone to download, sample, and reuse to their liking. That idea hit a snag when Warner Music of Brazil, which co-owns Gil's copyrights, balked at the notion of letting him give away his music.

On another contentious front in the IP wars -- software -- Brazil has thumbed its nose at Microsoft and other giants. 'The prime directive of the federal Institute for Information Technology is to promote the adoption of free software throughout the government and ultimately the nation,' writes Wired's Julian Dibbell. 'Ministries and schools are migrating their offices to open-source systems. And within the government's 'digital inclusion' programs -- aimed at bringing computer access to the 80 percent of Brazilians who have none -- GNU/Linux is the rule.'

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