Brazil reshapes debate on intellectual property

Brazil's President is often criticised by his old leftist friends for being conservative at home. But globally he has reshaped the debate on intellectual property rights to reflect the needs of poor nations.

In two years, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has forced the United Nations to change its global patent system, irked Microsoft Corp. by scorning its proprietary software and annoyed recording studios by putting the music of his dreadlocked culture minister online for free.

This year, the government will help one million middle-class families buy computers loaded with open-source software, which is developed collectively. It also will open 1,000 centres with free internet access, running free software, in poor neighbourhoods.

Mr Lula has accelerated a movement started by his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who pressured big drug companies to cut prices in the late 1990s after threatening to break patents on anti-AIDS cocktails.

Brazil is now at the forefront of what may be a global shift in how knowledge is produced and distributed. It has spurred a debate about what inventions should get patents, becoming intellectual property.

Mr Lula believes software, science and art should be governed by open-source laws that would loosen up current standards.

But some drugmakers and entertainment companies say they are losing money and the incentive to invest. They favour tighter patent rules and say they need more protections to justify hefty research budgets and expansion into developing countries such as China.

"Brazil is now the case study," said Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University in New York and general counsel of the Free Software Foundation. "It will play a major role in intellectual property talks and is going to provide an alternative example."

Along the way, Mr Lula has forged a diverse set of allies, including companies like Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, which support free software and now derive much of their revenue from services and hardware. There are also hippies turned digital libertarians such as John Perry Barlowe, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead band and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Government officials cheered this month when IBM released 500 patents to promote open-source technology.

"Sun, HP and IBM don't intimidate the Brazilian government, they collaborate with us," said Sergio Amadeu, Mr Lula's head of technology policy. He has helped Brazil's expansive bureaucracy abandon Microsoft's costly Windows operating system and adopt free alternatives like Linux instead.

Microsoft sued Mr Amadeu last year for criticising its closed-source business model but then dropped the charges. It declined to comment for this story but has said it is intensifying anti-piracy efforts.

This year, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organisation, which critics say traditionally has worked to tighten patent rules, is expected to loosen them under a joint Argentine-Brazil initiative that could, for example, improve access to patented AIDS drugs.

Advocates of open-source technology say society is morally obliged to increase access to knowledge and that science produces better results faster under a collaborative research model.

Brazil was the first country requiring all software programs developed by taxpayer funds to be licensed as open-source. That allows any individual or company to use any program, so long as they make modified versions available to everyone else.

"Free software is not synonymous with free lunch, but with free thought," said Ronaldo Lemos, a law professor at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas business school in Rio de Janeiro who helped bring the licences to Brazil.

Lula's culture minister, musician Gilberto Gil, has put at least one of his songs online for free, betting that he will make more money from concerts if more people have access to his music. In so doing, he provided an example for artist wanting to sell directly to listeners and cut out record companies in the middle.

Claudio Prado, Gil's head of efforts to change copyright rules for the arts, says the dominant model is antiquated.

"The commercial life of music right now is six months to a year, but copyrights can last 70 years, so lots of music gets stuck in the tomb of forgotteness," he said. Freeing up old music for remixes could improve earnings for artist, he said.

The United States has threatened to withdraw millions of dollars in trade benefits for Brazil unless it more actively enforces anti-piracy rules covering software and music. Brazil has agreed to do this, but says piracy exists only because of proprietary software.

"Fight piracy," Mr Amadeu said, "buy open-source software."