Dear all

Brazil is one of the governments that have requested Goggle to censor content.  Here are notes taken at the IGF08 Workshop 36 : Strategies to prevent and fight child pornography in developing countries

Child pornography in Brazil has grown out of the popularity of social networking.  However the main challenge has been issues related to jurisdiction as content is resident in ISPs based in the USA and trans-national ISPs like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google which have branches in strategic markets and have tailored the services for these markets in terms of language and content. 

Brazil was therefore unable to deal with serious offences related to content – specifically child pornography - committed by Brazilians using Brazilian IP addresses.  The government has been able to sign an agreement with Google to fight child pornography on Google's orkut social network.

The following are consideration taken in drawing up the agreement

1. Which criteria should be used to define the ability of a particular country to legislate over and sanction conducts committed on the internet?

-          Where the data is located?

-          International law principles (territoriality or nationality) shall be used to define the sovereignty of a state regarding – cyber space – which is a network of networks

-          Define some reasonable standard – for example managed by Brazilians and is local content and local language

-          Access points in Brazil, harmful conduct felt in the country – taken obligation under international law to take offence – country of origin approach would force thousands of users to unfamiliar rules and travel – offence under human rights therefore apply local legislation

2. It is legitimate to enforce the conduct of local office –as it impracticable to send legal request to the US.