Gilberto Gil, who had just become the minister of culture in Brazil, had read my essay “The Economy of Ideas.” Without informing me, he translated it into Portuguese. He felt it contained a vision of what needed to happen in order to return the ownership of Brazil’s genetic code—namely its music—from the clutches of Hollywood assholes who then controlled nearly all the copyrights.
As it turned out, Gil and I had a mutual friend who emailed me one day and asked if I would like to meet the minister of culture of Brazil. Both Gil and I were going to be speaking at Midem in Cannes in January 2004, and my friend asked if I would mind getting together with him there.
Midem, an acronym for Marché International du Disque et de l’Edition Musicale, is a massive music-business trade show attended by hundreds of lawyers, publishers, agents, managers, and artists. They had invited me only so the lawyers could take shots at my position about the use of music copyrights on the Internet.
I had always liked people taking shots at me, so I went. I was sitting in the bar of the Hotel Martinez surrounded by some of the most loathsome human beings imaginable, the European music industry. I was saving a seat for Gil, and I had to keep fending off people who wanted to take it by saying, “Sorry. I’m saving that for the minister of culture of Brazil.”
I looked around for what I imagined the minister of culture of Brazil would look like, expecting some gray fellow with a couple of minders. But then I saw a guy with three-inch dreads wearing a dashiki. I immediately knew this was the most interesting guy in the room, and he was somebody I really wanted to talk to.
However, when he made a beeline for my reserved seat, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m saving that seat for the minister of culture of Brazil.” And he said, “I am him.”
We started talking, and I was amazed by Gil on every level. The two of us hit it off right from the start. We talked and talked, and he was quite concerned about the nature of the future of the Internet in his country; it was then still in its infancy in Brazil. Eventually, we cooked up a plot that would allow us to seize the opportunity to take a major country’s policy on intellectual property and give it a hard turn in the direction of sense. Our original goal was to make Brazilian music available online so it could be remixed and shared with others.
Google had just come up with a social networking system that was a lot like what Facebook eventually became, and it might well have been. It was called Orkut, which was the first name of the guy who had created it for them. They wanted to keep the network from growing too fast right off the bat, so they only gave out a hundred free invitation rights each to a bunch of digital notables. I happened to be one of them.
By then, I had already claimed that Brazil was about to become an important part of the Internet because it was the most networked nation I had ever seen in terms of everybody’s connection to everybody else. The entire country was one vast horizontal matrix of friends and relatives and enemies. Brazil was also willing to overturn the copyright restrictions that were being imposed on the Internet. It was absolutely the test tube I had been looking for. So I took all one hundred of my invitations and gave them to Brazilians.
Not long after our meeting in Cannes, I made my first trip to Brazil to join Gil and Jack Lang, who had been the minister of culture in France, on a triumphal cultural tour. The tour coincided with carnival, and the three of us went around Brazil together to various carnival events in Rio, São Paulo, and Recife. Brazil itself was so completely like America in many ways that it was weird. It was also totally unlike America in that its people were completely self-effacing. There was a little bit of an apology in every sentence that everyone said.
People were puzzled by my presence on the tour. At one point, somebody said to Gil, “We understand you and Mr. Lang, but Barlow is not a minister of culture. In fact his country doesn’t even have one.” And Gil said, “Yes they do. It’s Mickey Mouse. And the reason we have a minister of culture is to keep theirs from taking ours over.”
Most of the people I met in Brazil had not yet had the opportunity to use digital technology. The Brazilian government had very stupidly thought they were going to develop their own indigenous computer industry and had put tariffs on everything digital coming into the country. They were way behind America, but Gil and I managed to change that.
After that first trip, I returned to Brazil repeatedly. I helped put on a conference there with Gil and Larry Lessig, whom I had met while spending a year as a founding fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard in 1999. Two years later, Larry had helped found Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to distributing free licenses to intellectual property based on existing copyrights. Larry’s focus at the conference was to explain how people could start embedding Creative Commons licenses into Brazilian law.
I also worked with Gil and some of his colleagues in setting up centro culturales in favelas around Brazil. These were spaces where young people could gather and learn how to create music and art with the computers we had given them. We also showed them how to do open-source code, which helped produce a Brazilian hacker culture. Soon they were making their own conto culturales.
Previously, there had always been grown-ups in charge who would not allow the kids to touch the machines except under supervision, so they could learn only how to become office slaves by using Excel or Word. We made it so anyone could come and learn how to work on their graffiti licks. There are now thousands of these conto culturales all over Brazil without any support from the government.
Within two or three months, the Orkut social network became 65 to 70 percent Brazilian, which really limited it. Although this proved my point beautifully, it certainly didn’t serve Google’s purposes very well. Despite the fact that Google shut it down worldwide in 2014, Orkut is still maintained in Brazil because it has remained so popular there.
As is generally the case when big changes take place, there was a reaction. Gil and I got a lot done, but much of it was undone by both internal and external forces. Still, there is more copyright freedom in Brazil now than in America, as well as far more awareness of Creative Commons.