We think its great when any organization’s website: governmental, non-governmental, corporate, or whatever, links to our content. The point of the CC license is that we want as many people to showcase our content as possible (as long as they credit and link back to the original GV posts) so that the bloggers we are aggregating get as much exposure and attention as possible. If some part of the U.S. government – or any government – wants to help us bring attention to the views of citizen bloggers around the world, that’s great. We should encourage U.S. government agencies to pay a lot more attention to what people around the world think – they don’t do it enough and should do it much more. Why would we want to prevent them from doing that? They are listing some of our country pages on a “blog watch” site. We aggregate blogs from countries the RFA covers. All they are doing is linking to our country pages. It’s not like we are doing one iota of original work for them. Furthermore there is no common practice on the web – at least that I’m aware of – of bloggers requiring compensation by people who want to link to them in their blogrolls or lists of recommended resources. Thus we don’t feel that anybody who would accuse us of some underhanded U.S. government affiliation would have much of a leg to stand on if their primary “evidence” is the fact that a U.S. government-funded website links to us.

Conspiracy theories attempting to connect dots between GV and the U.S. government affiliations of certain Berkman fellows, and other suspicions created by the fact that we are housed in the U.S., are exactly why we are planning to spin GV out of the Berkman Center as an independent non-profit organization, which will not be U.S. based. Location still under discussion and investigation. Ethan discussed this on the community e-mail list recently, to which I believe you subscribe.

Thanks for your concern about the way in which we are perceived.

Are you guys really comfortable with that? The appearance of carrying water for government policy positions would tend to undermine the “journalism” side of your reputation for “journalistic innovation,” wouldn’t it? Especially as the Berkman Center has a number of fellows who have worked for the government in the past. Perhaps if you could tell us that you don’t accept government funds for such uses, you could avoid that appearance.

Regarding the public domain licenses, this is indeed because of the different legal traditions. Under the “droit d’auteur” tradition, the so-called “moral” rights cannot be waived or assigned. Therefore, the functional equivalent to what “public domain” means in the US cannot be achieved in Brazil by means of a license.

Finally, as to the location of the iSummit, the choice of the place was due exclusively to logistics. Believe me, we checked a couple dozen places and most were unavailable or were unfeasible in terms of logistics.

Is there any equivalent term in Brazilian law, which has few elements of the English common law?

ANd does that difference in legal tradition have anything to do with the fact that the Public Domain Dedication is inapplicable in Brazil, for example?

I ask this from sincere puzzlement, mind you: My father-in-law is a USP-educated corporate lawyer, and even he has not been able to explain to me what current problem in Brazilian intellectual property law something like this might address. How might this untranslatability affect the acceptance and interpretation of CC licenses by Brazilian courts.

Certainly, I can understand how it might be beneficial to Brazilian cultural exports into markets where the CC means something different.

And personally, I’m all for that, having recently read Ruy Castro’s biography of Carmen Miranda, which has some eye-popping stories about safadezas committed by Tin Pan Alley down South American Way in the 1930s …

Also, respectfully, I can’t help being struck by how atypical of Brazilian public spaces was your choice of venue for the iCommons conference — Copacabana in the Zona Sul.

I can understand why you might not want to hold it in Rocinha, but why not hold it at a SESC, for example — or Rio’s RITS, or a Casa de Cultura in Recife — in a more representative Brazilian neighborhood? I think you may have misread the local publicity environment.

Not a few of the reactions I’ve registered from my and my wife’s combined Tupi blogging circles — petistas and peemedebistas alike, I might add — make ironic mention of the conference’s proximity to Copacabana’s infamous HELP, for example.

As one friend commented, who’s the CC-Br designed to benefit? Daslu? Or Daspu? :-)

All the best,

Ronaldo Lemos
CC-Brazil