Joint letter in defense of the good debate on intellectual property

The CPI on Cyber Crimes delivered its final report on March 31st. The formal referrals of the commission include the legislative proposal that authorizes the Brazilian Judiciary to request the connection provider to block access to sites that provide illegal content on the network, and included in the area of intellectual property. This document represents an opportunity to modernize Brazilian legislation related to the Internet environment, specifically with regard to the protection and encouragement of creativity, innovation and competitiveness in countless productive sectors.
 
The discussion of the protection of intellectual rights, based on the CPI investigations, means, at the same time, complementing important legislative advances that have taken place in the recent past and, also, elevating Brazil to the level of countries whose regulatory frameworks drive the productive chains of the future - especially the so-called creative economies and segments characterized by new technologies and intangible goods.
 
In this regard, the work of the CPI is relevant because it shows the need to offer protection and encouragement to creative genius, to innovative processes, to intellectual rights, especially in the challenging environment of the internet - where everything spreads, multiplies and reproduces at speed never before experienced by society.
 
The aforementioned bill meets the needs of the Brazilian economy, by incorporating a suggestion that makes it possible, BY COURT ORDER, to block websites whose activities are limited to commercially and illegally exploiting the fruit of the intellectual work of others.
 
In this sense, a good debate is one that not only listens to the various sectors involved and technically analyzes the topic, but above all takes place with intellectual honesty. The views presented by experts who manipulate opinions by omitting or even falsifying contradictory arguments do not contribute to the country.
 
The signatory entities of this letter respectfully urge the parliamentarians to reject such types of arguments with the purpose of debugging the legislative formulation that will come to follow. And from now on, it repudiates ideas repeatedly aired by specialists, about the supposed merely coercive and censorship character that would be embedded in the website blocking mechanisms – a device even used in several countries with the most developed economies in the world (United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, France, South Korea, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Italy, among others).
 
Such reductionism does not help the democratic debate around the issue. That the various aspects and consequences of the blocking site are legitimately discussed, but its characteristics and limitations are never falsified.
 
The comparison that has been made with blocking WhatsApp, for example, is wrong and has nothing to do with blocking illegal websites. The blocking proposed by the CPI on Cyber Crimes targets only those eminently pirated sites, which have the illicit in their DNA, always after express authorization from a competent judge.
 
Thus, the entities subscribed below come to the public to corroborate the importance of the work carried out by the Parliamentary Commission for Inquiry into Cyber Crimes, with regard to the above mentioned PL, while contributing with statements and data that have been widely considered in technical and political discussions -economic and regulatory, at international and national levels, namely:
 
a) Intellectual property encourages innovative production, through the attribution of specific and temporary rights to creators. The result of innovation finds in this system its source of protection, encouragement and propulsion;
 
b) Robust intellectual rights go hand in hand with freedom of expression, as creators vigorously defend their abilities to create, based on their choices and free from censorship;
 
c) Investing in inventiveness and creativity ensures the existence of creators, stimulating the creative industry and the circulation of knowledge – thus promoting global access to culture;
 
d) The Internet offers a great opportunity for new business models in the most diverse economic segments, as well as a space for more innovation, development and competitiveness; however, it also presents challenges and risks arising from the ease, quantity and speed with which content and services can be made available online without authorization;
 
e) The offense to intellectual property is commonly related to other types of criminal activities, such as fraud, credit card theft, illegal access to personal data, pornography facilitation, pedophilia and the propagation of numerous other malware;
 
f) The great challenge is to seek a balanced form of protection for these rights, which does not stifle technical innovation, nor suppress the growth of infrastructures on the global network, of new digital business models, nor of cultural dissemination;
 
g) Brazil has been downgraded year after year in international assessments on intellectual property protection; in the 4th edition of the International Intellectual Property Index (IP Index), the country had the tenth worst performance in the ranking of 38 countries;
 
h) Recent data from the National Forum Against Piracy and Illegality (FNCP) show that the illegal market, in 2015 alone, generated sector losses and tax evasion, approximately R$ 115 billion;
 
i) International studies show that countries that protect intellectual property have, on average, 2.5 times the workforce employed in Research and Development and receive the highest 45% score by rating agencies. In difficult times, protecting intellectual property can be one of the exits from the economic crisis;
 
j) It is widely known that content hosted anywhere in the world can be accessed on any computer connected to the Internet – one of the great miracles of technology, giving millions of people the opportunity to access knowledge. It is also a great challenge to Justice when illegal content is shared in another part of the world, making it almost impossible for the creator of that work to claim the rights to their talent;
 
k) The possible solution, modern, democratic and republican, adopted in the most modern democracies and economies in the world, is the possibility of blocking websites whose activities are limited to commercially exploiting works for which they do not have the intellectual right, ALWAYS THROUGH ANALYSIS AND JUDICIAL DECISION. The competent judge may, thus, determine the suspension of traffic from PROVEN CRIMINAL websites, through a court decision directed to internet providers in Brazil;
 
l) The protection of intellectual property means doing what is necessary to achieve an economy based mostly on knowledge, on the undeniable creativity of our population and on the courage of our entrepreneurs.
 
Taking into account such critical factors, the PL included in the final report presented by the CPI on Cyber Crimes, last March 31, contains a fair and balanced proposal for solving the aforementioned considerations.