Brazil, as you may have noticed in the country pages at the P2P Foundation, is one of the leading countries regarding open and commons-related developments.

This is how we start the collection of resources of that country:

“Brazil is at the forefront of a new movement challenging established Intellectual Property regimes in a variety of ways. In the past it has negotiated international conventions on drug patents to make HIV/AIDS medication available at cheaper prices. More recently, it has been promoting Open Source software to decrease dependency on proprietary software. Given the tradition of a vibrant popular culture, especially music, Brazil is also embracing Creative Commons, an alternative copyright framework, which encourages the sharing and distribution of cultural works. In this context it is building the “Canto Livre” project; an archive and collaborative production platform on the Internet to produce and make music available to the world. Here again Brazil challenges established market forces. Music distribution, like the pharmaceutical sector or the computer and software market, is dominated by US and European companies. In addition, Brazil and Argentina were the proponents of a new agenda for the World Intellectual Property Organization, seeking to promote a more balanced international regime on Intellectual Property vis a vis the pursuit of development.”

A recent article in Open Democracy, on the topic of the digital cultural commons and what the author calls ‘semiotic democracy’, confirms this with another example, regarding music:

“Brazil, despite its relatively strong copyright law on the books, has
been a hotbed of commons-based activity in practice. The entire genre of
Baile funk, which has emerged from Brazil’s ghetto-like favelas and has
begun to pervade mainstream culture there, relies almost exclusively on
remixing. Go to a Funk Ball, or Baile, in the favela of Rocinha in Rio
de Janeiro, and you will likely recognize samples and snippets of a good
amount of the music you hear – from Prince to New Order to 50 Cent.

What’s more, the music is created without any regard to copyright, and
this is what allows it to flourish. Artists freely borrow and remix from
others, and CDs are sold on the streets for little more than the cost of
the production of the physical CD. Artists don’t receive royalties from
the CDs, but instead view them as promotion of their work and their
performances, and some of the parties that are organised attract tens of
thousands of fans. Needless to say, these Bailes can be extremely
lucrative for the funk artists. Brazil has also been extremely
progressive in supporting open business models (or those that do not
rely on restricting access to content or culture), has been active in
patent-busting, and has generally viewed culture as a space to which
citizens have a right to access, as opposed to a commodity to which
consumers have a right to purchase.”