Thanks to the pressure from many fronts, the initial draft proposed by Senator Eduardo Azeredo, which gathered unanimous rejection by the blogosphere, has been re-written for the better. The demand for user identification before they can take any action on the Internet, such as blogging, e-mailing or chatting, has been dropped, and some advances have even been made with the inclusion of an article to criminalize online racism.

On the other hand, many acts that would be considered trivial conduct when surfing the Internet are still typified as a crime, as explains blogger and lawyer Lu Monte [pt], while the online pedophilia issue, which was supposed to be the main motivation behind the new law, has been touched only superficially in just one of the proposed articles.

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Bloggers and Internet users in general demand more transparency and are mobilizing to fight for it. However, there is still a lot of confusion around the issues and many people are still referring to the earlier pre-amendment text to question the law. This doesn?t come as a surprise considering that the public has not been invited into the debate and that only agreeable people were allowed to attend the open sessions discussing the law at the Senate.

It is a general consensus that the matter was not debated enough, and to help with it a blog carnival against censorship [pt] has been called for next Saturday, July 19. The original text of the proposal, available here [pt], is being translated into English by a group of volunteers, in order to raise international awareness. Meanwhile, an online petition [pt] in defense of freedom and progress of knowledge on the Brazilian Internet created by some very respected Brazilian cyberculture academics and ativists [pt] has been signed by over 58,000 citizens in just one week."

Labels: Brazil, Cybercrime, lei azeredo, petition