Marcelo Thompson

So, here goes a Sci-Fi thought (or perhaps not quite). If singularity theories turn out to be right, what to make of a principle of technological neutrality (in law and politics)? Even if we assume the internal coherence of such a principle. Even if we assume that there is a sound legal theoretical way of [...]

Download in PDF Below you will find some notes I wrote last month upon request of the British Council, on the occasion of the Sergio Vieira de Mello Annual Lecure, given by Professor Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Former President of Brazil. A webcast of the event can be found here. The views conveyed in these notes express [...]

Some very significant bodies of the Brazilian Government and government-owned corporations have just signed an agreement to adopt Open Document Format as their standard format for the exchange of electronic documents. While the agreement merely conveys their intention of adopting ODF, it also firms up their commitment to “plan, organize, and enable such policy in the federal government”, one official said. The announcement [...]

Many think of the Internet Governance Forum as being nothing but a multi-stakeholders monumental talk shop. Even if so, that would not be so hopeless for an area in which customs play a decisive role; an area to whose build-up the showcase of state practices and formalization of diferent levels of opinio juris very widely contribute: the area of international human rights law. Though derided as a talk [...]

Brazilian Sunday TV news program “Fantástico” showed in its last edition that a gang of supposed fraudsters would be offering their services to Brazilian politicians. The services in question would involve the manipulation of electronic voting systems to elect illegitimate candidates in the upcoming municipal suffrage.

My last post discussed the vagueness-precision dichotomy in light of Canadian copyright reform. Ironically, the matter resurfaces today, now in the UK. IPKat brings news on the Higgs case, in which Neil Higgs, also known as “MrModchips“, escaped conviction arguably because of the complexities of English copyright law.

Osgoode Hall Prof Pina D’Agostino has published a sensible column on Bill C-61 in the Toronto Star. Much unlike Bill C-61, her message was clear — we need to police our tone to offer a sober academic perspective on Canadian copyright reform — as she advocated legal intervention to balance the interests of users, owners, [...]

Revisiting Kathy Bowrey’s insightful Law & Internet Cultures I noticed that she opens the book with an intriguing remark about IETF RFCs. She notes that RFC 2026 prompts IETF technical standards to be “designed to help facilitate best practice in terms of [inter alia] fairness”. This is a powerful assertion. But is it right?

Brazil has entered the 21st century making clear choices with regard to some core technological matters and reflecting these choices in an objective political framework. [1] Those core matters were authentication technologies, software licensing, and digital inclusion. The choices were for an authentication technologies framework based on a national public key infrastructure in which the [...]

:: Download in PDF :: It sounds fairly eloquent to say that Internet Service Providers should not discriminate packages of data according to their source, content, or destination, and to call this network “neutrality”. It seems almost as a truism, which everyone who cares for the value of openness deems to be self-evident. Dare to [...]