Cannibalizing copyright? Vernacularizing open intellectual property in Brazil (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Abstract

With the expansion of intellectual property and its policing multinationally, Brazil gained a reputation for actively supporting and pursuing more “open” alternatives. In 2004 Brazil became one of the first countries to ‘port’ Creative Commons alternative licensing there with then Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, lending his support as both a politician and a renowned musician. In this article I show how global and local media heralded Brazil as the model for alternative copyright, frequently citing a poem, “The cannibalist manifesto” (DeAndrade 1928)—which proposed cannibalism as a metaphor for Brazilian national identity–as evidence of its long‐standing creative appropriation. Allusions to ‘anthropophagy’ have vernacularized alternative copyright and open intellectual property practices as particularly ‘Brazilian’ by constructing narratives hinging on imagined indigenous Brazilians. Furthermore, the search for contemporary Brazilian models of creative economies seemingly without intellectual property has focused on tecnobrega, a copyright‐flaunting, seemingly pro‐piracy electronic music from the Amazonian region. Yet discourses celebrating Brazil as the model for life without private property also echo profoundly ambivalent colonial era discourses without problematizing their legacies. Not only did writings on indigenous Brazilians – seemingly lacking any concept of property – inspire French humanists' revolutionary political philosophies, but also justified colonization of the ‘commons.’ In addition to drawing from my larger ethnographic research project in Brazil beginning in 2008, this article analyzes relevant media including documentary films, popular magazine articles, and websites.