The Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet (or the Virtual Times of a Postmodern Law)

Abstract

the paper presents a critical perspective about the article “Le temps virtuel des lois postmodernes ou comment le droit se traite dans la societe de l’information” (“The Virtual Time of Postmodern Laws, or How the Law is Processed in the Information Society”), published by the philosopher and jurist Francois Ost, with the purpose of conducting a case study through the Brazilian law “Marco Civil da Internet” (“Civil Rights Framework for the Internet”). The article analyzes the profound changes in the way the law came to be produced and interpreted, in the passage from the forms of writing and printing based on paper to the forms of text processing and communication based on computers and networks. The law known as “Marco Civil da Internet” (Law 12,965 / 2014) was used here as a validity test of the main elements of the text under examination, by means of illustrations and references published by the international media, especially after the diplomatic incidents arising from the revelations of the electronic monitoring of international telecommunications, conducted by the National Agency of Security (NSA) of the United States of America. The study concludes that Ost’s article, published even before the Internet massification, can be considered as a premonitory insight about the changes in the operation and reproduction of law in the postmodern society, in which the hierarchical and pyramidal understanding of law moves to a distributed and networked understanding and * Doutorando em Direito na Universite de Montreal, Canada. Bolsista CAPES/Programa Ciencia sem Fronteiras. Email: cristiano.therrien@umontreal.ca ** Professor titular da Faculdade de Direito da Universite de Montreal e pesquisador do Centre de recherche en droit public. Email: pierre.trudel@umontreal.ca