Free Software and Free Culture in Brazil
Brazil is truly progressive in its embrace of Free Culture and Free Software.
At the 2008 Forum Internacional Software Livre Brazil’s Ministry of Education unveiled the numbers for their ongoing Proinfo Project which aims to create 53,000 Free Software Labs by the end of 2009 supporting digital literacy and Internet access for up to 52 million students. Could this be the largest state supported implementation of Free Software on Earth?
ProInfo and Linux Educacional - KDE in Public Schools in Brazil
The 20 minute video bellow is a passionate speech given by Brazilian President Lula da Silva about the importance of Free Software and the Internet at the 10th Free Softaware Internacional Forum, in Porto Alegre, Brazil - June 26th, 2009.
“The free software somehow is this, I say, it is giving people the opportunity to do new things, create new things, as there is no thing that guarantees freedom most than to ensure individual expression, allowing people to enhance their creativity, their intelligence, especially in a new country like Brazil”
English subtitles are available.
Also the Brazilian Ministry for Culture has put forth a proposal to reform copyright law to recognise citizens rights to fair use in private copying and mashups.
“In practice, those who bought a DVD or CD can create a backup copy for personal use or you can pass on the movie or the music to your computer, changing the physical medium (such as the hard plastic of the CD or DVD) to digital (whether the file to MP3, WMA and OGG or AVI and MPEG).
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The reform also provides for “(…) the use of short extracts from existing works, where the use itself is not the main purpose of new work and does not prejudice the normal exploitation of the work reproduced, giving legal backing to the creation of mashups music or visual.”
(via http://twitter.com/glynmoody and http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/11/brazil-to-allow-private-copying-and.html)