Programme

6.15pm - Registration

6.30pm - Lecture starts

7.30pm - Lecture ends

Reforming Freedom of Expression Legislation in Brazil: from online public participation to the impact on intellectual property 

Brazil has just approved its own Internet Bill of Rights. Before the three years in which the National Congress discussed complex issues such as net neutrality, intermediaries’ liability, intellectual property and privacy (in the wake of the Snowden revelations), the Draft Bill of Law was submitted to an online consultation that has fostered discussion amongst different stakeholders. The role of academia was especially important by framing the debate and assessing how international experiences could be adapted to the national context. Freedom of expression is one right that stands out in the Internet Bill of Rights. From a tentative copyright reform to a recent decision by the Supreme Court allowing the publishing of non-authorized biographies, the landscape for the protection of free speech could be changing for the better on one side. On the other, several Bills of Law are being discussed in the Congress in order to create a dangerously broad and unrestricted right to be forgotten. The talk will address those changes, focusing on the different ways in which free speech legislation is being reformed in Brazil.

Speaker

Dr Carlos Affonso Souza is the Founder and Director of the Institute for Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro (ITS). Dr Souza holds a doctorate and a master’s degree in civil law from the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ, 2009 and 2003). He is an Associate Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and a Policy Fellow at Access. He is a professor of Private Law at UERJ and at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Dr Souza has been involved in many Internet governance activities at ICANN and at the United Nation’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF). He is a consulting partner at Chediak Law Firm.