Brazil: The Copy Shop and the Cloud

In Brazil, debates about access to educational materials in higher education have been dominated for years by disputes about the legal and moral implications surrounding photocopying. Until 1998, Brazilian copyright law permitted anyone to make full, single copies of protected works for personal, not-for-profit use.1 This limitation on copyright protection anchored a complex web of curricular and student practices that developed in the course of the 1970s and 1980s as photocopiers came into widespread use. When that permission was withdrawn in the copyright reform act of 1998 (Law 9610/98), publishers tried to recapture that part of the market—first by trying to persuade universities to negotiate licenses and later opting for police raids to break the copy culture on university campuses. For the most part, these efforts failed, leaving university copy culture largely unaffected and creating a stalemate on copyright reform that continues to this day. In the meantime, parts of the photocopying ecosystem have shifted online—though publisher enforcement efforts have undercut the emergence of any large-scale shadow libraries to rival the Russian examples from chapter 1...