Vitor Ido of the University of São Paulo (USP) explains the context of the renewed focus on remuneration of creatives in Latin America, especially in Brazil. He focuses on the desire by Brazil’s new government to regulate the power of large corporates, especially those based in the Global North, especially the tendency to exploit Brazil’s creative content at the expense of local authors and creators.
This presentation was delivered at the User Rights meeting in Geneva on 17 June 2025. The full text is available below.
The political context in Brazil: A renewed commitment to national creative industries
It’s a pleasure to be here and thank you so much for the invitation. So I’ll try to feed into this discussion of remuneration rights, but with a different framing and a different entry point in particular: the reasons why GRULAC and Latin America wanted to bring this discussion to WIPO and how there’s kind of a big mismatch between what’s taking place at the national or regional level and what’s taking place more globally.
My interpretation is that we need to understand that at least in Brazil, potentially slightly different from what we’re seeing in Europe, there’s two main things: On the one hand, renewed attention to creative industries as strategic to the Brazilian economy and Latin America more broadly. And on the other hand, regulation of huge platforms.
It’s the post-Bolsonaro context. So this is responding to an authoritarian context in which you had severe cutting in culture industries financing, but also deregulation in the platform sector, which also led to direct consequences for democracy, just like we saw in other countries as well. So if we look from that point of view, when we look at how this new government tried to pitch creative industries as one core focus, you see new fiscal policies, you see new legislation and direct and indirect support to not only authors, but movies and all different cultural sectors. That’s where we get to the remuneration issues: low to minimum to absolutely no remuneration at all for authors, in particular by foreign large platforms.
And it’s said all the time in Brazil that our Minister of Culture, who’s also an artist, she pretty much gains nothing and she’s well-known, super well-known actually, and she gets basically nothing out of Spotify. On top of that, of course, there are general concerns about a workforce being displaced by artificial intelligence and thinking about the economic potentials of exporting some of our cultural assets to other countries, not just Lusophone countries, but then potentials for conventional streaming platforms like Netflix. So during the pandemic, for instance, when that was the setting, there was no direct support by the government, what we had was just that sort of investment.
But also on the other hand, the issue of regulating platforms, what you see, and maybe that’s one of the things that’s being discussed outside of Brazil more, is how the Supreme Court has taken a very active role in regulating platforms, and even this week they’re about to finalise a reframing of a longstanding provision that was basically a safe harbour, not liability, for platforms that is about to be reshaped. And some people in the international literature are even calling it kind of a Brazil model in the making.
Remuneration to support and protect journalism and other key sectors
But where it fits into remuneration, is that very explicitly the government is saying to counter misinformation, it’s not just about digital literacy, but also about having enough instruments to support journalism, quality journalism, alternative journalism, black-owned journalism, indigenous peoples-owned journalism, women-owned journalism. And because of a fading business model, that also means that potentially new support in the form of remuneration can be part of this agenda.
This is just one example. Another is that, of course, dubbing [of movies and TV] in Brazil is a really huge cultural industry in an economic sense. You see this campaign that is talking not only about the loss of a whole profession, but also how this fits into notions of being Brazilian, what does it mean to speak Brazilian Portuguese, what does it mean to export it all, and the impact of being translated into an AI [voice], which Netflix actually did on a few occasions. It’s not, therefore, just a workforce displacement issue, but also that broader cultural repercussion that needs to be taken into account.
The rights of indigenous people to protect traditional knowledge
I just wanted to add, as well, a couple of other issues that I think are important for us to understand more broadly. I think the core in Brazil would be there’s more reasons to be concerned about misappropriation, particularly when we’re talking about minorities, than de facto issues with L&Es not existing.
I’m referring, of course, to Alan [Rocha]’s very well-known argument of how courts in Brazil have historically been trying to compensate for the bad legislation that does not really have L&Es, but that de facto end up authorising utilizations, for instance, for both research and educational purposes. In the policy realm, there’s also other reasons to be concerned about what’s going on, with the provisions related to big funders that are licencing some of our preservation and museums and archives policies that often just have that blunt open access provisions that are not really aligned with the way you need to negotiate and ponder things with indigenous peoples.
I refer to the launch of the University of Sao Paulo’s new Centre of Documentation of Indigenous Languages and Cultures that took place a couple of weeks ago. It’s a very exciting, huge project, and one of the main issues there is precisely how do you do preservation and archival resources with direct participation of indigenous peoples. One of the main issues is you can’t start with an [open] access provision.
It might end with that, but then you need to calibrate issues related to traditional knowledge, so when we bring forward that kind of concrete issue and we translate it into broad WIPO discussions, that also means that Latin America, in general, has potentially more reasons, at least for now, to be focusing on the traditional knowledge part of things.
The context of AI Regulation in Brazil and the broader debate about regulation
From all of what I’ve said, I guess one of the two main takeaways for now is that there’s a renewed importance of public speeches around remuneration rights and also how regulation of AI is part of both the direct regulation of huge platforms, but also the issue of the creative industries in Brazil. One particular point there is that industry representatives always insist, just like everywhere else, on the innovation versus regulation trade-off, arguing that if we regulate too much, then there won’t be AI innovation in Brazil.
I think that’s a good point to just mention a little bit the status of what’s going on in Brazil. We often refer to what’s taking place in the new AI draft Bill, but I think it’s important as well to note that there are other processes at the National Congress right now, including two streaming draft Bills. And again, their focus, it’s kind of a convoluted language for now, to be honest, but it relates to more clearly delineating anti-competitive practices that could support competition authority scrutiny, but also a broader longstanding agenda of ensuring national content or quota mechanisms for streaming as well. Just like in other countries, like the famous example of France, you have national quota mechanisms for audiovisual, but you don’t have that for streaming.
Remuneration rights, Exceptions and opt-outs in the AI Draft Bill
That’s one of the core policy discussions. Then that’s where we get to the current AI draft Bill. One of the things I just wanted to highlight, and the reason why I started with that broader framing is that the current text, after tons of different forms of submissions, continues to include a research exception for non-commercial uses, but does include something that would be the inverse of the European opt-out mechanism.
I think that’s important to stress. There’s a lot of people arguing that so far there’s no clear way of technically implementing what’s being proposed. How the government has been responding is that the fact that it’s not so clear as of now how to technically implement issues like transparency reporting or opt-out mechanisms or any other forms or variations thereof is not sufficient reason not to include such mechanisms in the law in the first place.
Something I would agree. But I think that what’s important there is that there’s a specific delineation of remuneration rights for users related to mining, training, and development of AI systems. But two elements that are often overlooked and I think they’re useful for our discussion here is the fact that you have reciprocity between jurisdictions as a rule.
Reciprocity in the AI Draft Bill and targeting
So Brazilian copyright law, because of TRIPS, of course, does not discriminate between nationals and foreigners, but they’re trying to implement there something a little bit distinct, something for open discussion, of course. If you don’t have equivalent remuneration protection for Brazilian rights holders in the other jurisdiction, then that won’t be applicable to you in Brazil. I think that’s important also in terms of international negotiations and discussions.
But then also the second point is that the quantum of remuneration, the exact amount, should be dependent on, that’s important, the size of the institution or company that is training the AI and its competitive effects. This is, of course, something that is not so clear. But then I think it’s important to understand what’s the background of this whole discussion.
Targeting corporate power
So where do we stand? I think that although all of those things overlap, it’s important to distil and differentiate issues of having the consent, authorisation, and misappropriation. I think that’s core for all the stakeholders in Brazil, perhaps even more so than in other jurisdictions, and that’s the case of Latin America as well. I think it’s also important to see this difference between the cases where remuneration has been used strategically, so to say, as perhaps the only last possibility for a fading existing business model.
And that’s obviously the case of journalism. That’s the way journalism organisations have been advocating for this bill in Brazil. And people would respond by saying, you need to find something else, and then say it again and be like, if you don’t give us any form of remuneration, we will simply no longer exist in a few years.
But what ties everything is just general concern about corporate power by foreign players in particular. This is not to say, of course, that there are not huge Brazilian conglomerates that are part of this discussion, but I guess this foreign domestic division has been important as well for the way we’ve been framing these discussions. And that’s where I get to the point that AI regulation and remuneration are, of course, part of all of that.
Beyond WIPO
But I think we cannot really totally dissociate issues of the research questions with everything else. So getting to the last part of the presentation, so how does this all relate to what the group of Latin American and Caribbean countries have been bringing to WIPO? I think one point is that WIPO is not the only arena where this has been brought by Latin American countries, in Brazil in particular. The G20 has been an important arena as well.
The BRICS, the Organisation of Ibero-American States, and some less well-known organisations, as it were. Not necessarily a treaty as the end goal, but just trying to see if common experiences and some policy coordination can be useful. I think that’s important.
I think implicitly the other point is that we need to understand that the regulation efforts are always harder in Latin America than they are in regions like Europe, where also socioeconomic problems are, of course, much larger. And of course, the case we always refer to is how Uruguay amended its copyright law to include fair and equitable remuneration, and right after, Spotify threatened to leave the country. Of course, Brazil is not Uruguay in terms of the economic size of the population and the market, but that kind of threat, similar to what we saw, for instance, with compulsory licencing, Germany issued a compulsory licence with its federal court.
No consequence whatsoever from that economic threatening point of view. That obviously is not the case in any Latin American country. But also with respect to how consolidated and strong are the CMOs in the continent.
Geopolitics and the Latin American Context
So all of this, of course, brings the north-south issue as a very prominent feature of this discussion, because we just referred to how Europe has important reference to fair remuneration in their own domestic regional legislations. Meanwhile, they refrain from accepting the advancement of such discussions at WIPO. So I think this, and I believe this will make sense, getting straight to the two last slides that will try to compile the core message of what I’m going to say, is that so when GRULAC decided to update a proposal that was originally tabled in 2015, pursuant as well to two different market studies made by the WIPO Secretariat, so there was a new issue, AI.
But I guess more generally, there’s also the sense of trying to get something that would be focused on Latin American preoccupations, both in terms of where the economies can be much stronger, cultural industries, but also where they’re suffering the most. So I guess it’s a way of understanding that, at least for now, it’s really more about trying to consolidate the discussions, generally speaking, rather than one single topic. Usually your opinion has been saying, oh, this is going everywhere, all over the place, we don’t really know where this is going to take us, but I guess that’s, you know, this political economy of what’s taking place in the continent helps us understand that.
Conclusions on the location of the remuneration agenda in WIPO
So I guess that this can be helpful for us to understand that when remuneration is referred to at WIPO at this point, there’s the issue of the debate on the promotion of cultural industries, that’s one thing. But then there’s also these two other aspects, broader corporate power regulation and AI regulation. It’s very clear that they often overlap.
I think it’s been useful for us to try to differentiate those things. But even more importantly, dismissing as a non-issue or as unimportant as sometimes that has been taking place in the past few years can be seen as quite patronising for Latin American countries. So how do you place remuneration into a potential L&E instrument? I just have two main messages.
It cannot be an afterthought. And I’m honestly not really sure whether this should be included at all. If we are to simply have a language referring to nothing in this instrument will prevent remuneration or remuneration should not prevent the enjoyment of L&Es, I think you get into a political economy problem at WIPO.
So I think what’s the last differentiation I wanted to make for this presentation is I think there’s good reasons to separate how remuneration and broadcasting and L&Es are bundled together at WIPO because of the agenda and the way historically these items have come through. And another thing is trying to cross-reference them in a single instrument. At least for now, I’m not so sure about this.
It seems to me that there’s not really such a place for cross-referencing, although there’s obviously a lot of space in dealing with these three together from a WIPO agenda point of view. Thank you very much. Looking forward to the discussion.
Note: there may be some inaccuracies in this transcript due to the use of automated transcription tools. A video version is available here.
