TechDirt, 02/09/2012
A lawyer I know passed along a letter from the Brazilian government to Sedo, a company that helps sell domains and also hosts parked domains (on which it puts some advertising), demanding that it take down a domain that it did not like. The text of the email is included below, but there are plenty of troubling things about the demand. First, the URL in question was an .eu domain, meaning that I can’t see how the Brazilian government has any authority whatsoever. The URL did, however, suggest that it involved porn content related to Brazil (in that it has the word Brazil in it, as well as another word/phrase suggesting porn). Brazil could not like the fact that people have registered domains about Brazilian pornography, but I don’t see how that gives the country any authority whatsoever to demand the domain be taken offline completely. And, yet, according to the letter:
The registration and use of this domain name may lead users to believe that Brazil is a tourist attraction and pole of sexual activities, which interferes on the position and image of the country.
Moreover, websites with pornographic contents on the Internet that makes direct and/or indirectly mention to the characteristics related with the Brazilian identity, such as colors of the flag, culture pictures and images of cities, sets as a crime, punishable by the Brazilian Penal Code, Federal Law n. 9.279/1996:
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