YouTube appears to be out of options in Brazil.
Last week, a judge demanded that the site take down a certain video (which I’m told includes footage of a Brazilian model having sex on the beach); persistent users made sure that it kept reappearing.
Now some Brazilian ISPs have obeyed court orders to “switch off” access to YouTube.
Telefonica SA is the latest ISP to block the site. According to the Associated Press, this will prevent “millions of Internet users in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro from viewing YouTube.” That company is only following the lead of Brasil Telecom SA, though, which “confirmed that it had blocked the site in a swath of the country stretching from the capital of Brasilia to the Amazon.”
The country’s largest telecommunications company, Empresa Brasileira de Telecomunicacoes SA, has not yet blocked YouTube, although it may still do so.
The whole thing has, to put it plainly, become a mess. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick noted that “all of the legal wrangling over the video has only made it much more popular around the world.”
The discussion that follows wanders off topic (amidst demands for a link to the video), but the participants seem to agree on that point.
“In the meantime,” Mike continued, “all the customers of this particular ISP . . . will get pissed off that their ISP is blocking all of the perfectly legitimate videos on YouTube on the chance that someone might upload yet another copy of the sex video (which YouTube has quickly been removing every time it’s been added).”
It remains unclear how long the Brazilian court’s ban on YouTube will remain in effect, but it doesn’t appear that the situation is going to be resolved anytime soon.
Google can’t be happy.
UPDATE: I was very, very wrong with that “anytime soon” comment. Actually, the resolution couldn’t have come sooner.
The AP link now states that “a Brazilian judge reversed course Tuesday and lifted his order banning YouTube from being viewed in Brazil because of a sexy video of supermodel Daniela Cicarelli that circulated widely on the file sharing site.”
Whoops. Who could have predicted that a government official would see reason?
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Doug is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest eBusiness news.
