Brazil, Google, and YouTube, Part Two

Or is it part three?  Part two is ban on YouTube imposed by the Brazilian judge overseeing the case of model Daniela Cicarelli and her boyfriend, Renato Malzoni aggrieved over the video of them getting it on at a beach in Spain.  The video appears on YouTube much to their dismay.  YouTube keeps deleting it and users keep uploading it.  That prompted a court order for YouTube to shut down, not that the court had the power to enforce its order on a company located in the United States.

That order changed into having ISPs in Brazil blocking YouTube, which some of them did.  The reaction by Internet users was predictable, and the judge came in for a lot of heavy criticism in that country.  Then the order to block YouTube was rescinded.  The judge still wants YouTube to install software to insure the privacy of Cicarelli and Malzoni.  Fine, although this conclusion could have been reached without the drama.  With all the publicity this generated the judge practically insured that their privacy would not be respected by anyone as uploaders flooded other sites with the same clip.

I suggested in my original post on this incident that the video was generated by the couple, which was a wrong assumption.  It was filmed by someone who caught them in the act.  Still, a description of the video in Information Week suggests that the couple hardly tried to hide what they were doing in a very public place filled with people.  It seems, then, that the couple may have had less concern about their privacy at the time the act was filmed.  Oh, the irony.