In a São Paulo Court, Vandals Pull a YouTube Switcheroo

Vandals want the handle, or, Innovations in due process of law, with the connivance or acquiescence of a lazy or disingenuous press. Sound familiar, fellow gringos?

Executive Summary

The so-called “judicial order to block YouTube in Brazil” was irregular, illegitimate, null and void. From the very start. So we are gathering from the latest newsflow and the original documents in the case.

What we have here is one judge violating procedure in an attempt to reverse an unfavorable outcome in a SLAPP suit as decided by another judge.

Or something to that effect. IANAFL.

Which means a lot of the press here in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro really, really screwed the pooch.

Again.

The same goes for the Associated Press, too.

Again.

For as we know, the selective blocking of the URL in question is technically possible.

The people who said it is not were lying to the public.

And no one seems to have outed them on it.

Recital

Funny, the ordem de bloqueio do YouTube no Brasil — “order to block YouTube in Brazil” — I find hosted on the G1 news service is not the same document I downloaded yesterday under the same general description from another source.

The document I saw yesterday is the finding by the desembargador, or presiding judge, I guess you would say, Mr. Zuliani, who found that YouTube had to make the Cicacarelli video inaccessible to Brazilian Internet users.

The document that Mr. Blum is touting today as “ambiguous” to this respect, however, is the order issued by another magistrate, the juiz de direito, a certain Mr. Lincon Antônio Andrade de Moura.

The latter document does contain the language cited here, to the effect that

foi concedido efeito ativo para determinar que Vossa Senhoria tome, por tempo indeterminado, uma das providências sugeridas nos autos, abaixo relacionadas, objetivando o bloqueio do site www.youtube.com, da cor-ré YouTube Inc, aos Internautas brasileiros,

Therefore, what Mr. Zuliani made quite clear last Thursday, in a press release he issued to all and sundry, is that Mr. Andrade de Moura sabotaged the tenor and scope of his ruling, during what was presumably supposed to be a routine adminstrative handoff and signoff.

A switcheroo was pulled.

And I am extremely angry with reporters who failed to make this clear to me before.

This late-breaking news development, for example — YouTube.com will now not be blocked “because Mr. Zulani changed his mind” — is erroneous and misleading.

O desembargador Ênio Santarelli Zuliani, do Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo, voltou atrás em sua decisão de proibir o acesso ao portal de vídeos YouTube, segundo explicou em despacho publicado na manhã desta terça-feira, 09. Zuliani mantém a “determinação para que se tomem providências no sentido de bloquear o acesso ao vídeo de filmagens do casal, desde que seja possível, na área técnica, sem que ocorra interdição do site completo“.

And here I have been working under the assumption all this time that Mr. Zulani’s ruling was the source of the alleged ambiguity in the ruling.

Here is a selection from the story in Último Segundo today (or was it yesterday?) on the Opice (Bialystock &) Blum maneuver, for example:

De acordo com o advogado Renato Opice Blum, um dos maiores especialistas em Direito na Internet, em entrevista do jornal “O Estado de S.Paulo”, o despacho do desembargador Ênio Santarelli Zuliani, do Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo, é “ambíguo”.

According to attorney Renato Opice Blum, one of the foremost specialists in Internet law, in an interviw with the Estadão, the order from judge Zuliani of the São Paulo court is “ambiguous.”

No, the real source of ambiguity in this case has been the way that the press has consistently reported that it was “a São Paulo court” that made this decision.

But it was unambiguously not  Mr. Zuliani, the judge with the authority to rule on the substance of the case, who sought to give Telefonica, for instance — which partners with the Grupo Abril on content — the go-ahead to block out Google’s YouTube service entirely.

Thank goodness for Consultor Juridico, which published the full text of Mr. Zuliani’s order countermanding and nullifying the “block www.youtube.com” order just now.

Let me see if I can describe the workflow here correctly, given the state of my knowledge of Brazilian administrative procedure.

What the hell: I once made some headway into Byzantine theology, and this is basically the same sort of thing.

Mr. Zuliani was the desembargador, as I said — the court official assigned to rule on the merits of the case and then send it along to a, what? presiding judge? something like that? for ratification as to form and procedure.

And it appears from the latest news that he has now successfully reasserted his full authority to rule on the case, barring formal errors and procedural lapses.

So what was Andrade de Moura’s role, as juiz de direito?

In his mind, it was to legislate from the bench, apparently.

Who is this man?

We will have to try to dig around a bit for the details there.

Is the man on the New OAB‘s controversial watchlist on crooked judges, for example?

That might be a place to start.

Here is the text of Lincon’s order:

Senhor(a) Diretor(a),

Pelo presente, passado nos autos em epígrafe, informo a Vossa Senhoria que por decisão da Quarta Câmara do Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de São Paulo, foi concedido efeito ativo para determinar que Vossa Senhoria tome, por tempo indeterminado, uma das providências sugeridas nos autos, abaixo relacionadas, objetivando o bloqueio do site www.youtube.com, da cor-ré YouTube Inc, aos Internautas brasileiros, informando, após, o Juízo, da providência tomada.

1. Colocar um filtro na entrada da solicitação de acesso por um usuário brasileiro, dessa forma essa solicitação nem chega no computador americano.
2. Colocar um filtro na entrada da resposta do website americano, dessa forma a informação não chega ao usuário brasileiro.

Aproveito a oportunidade para apresentar a Vossa Senhoria protestos de estima e consideração.

Lincon Antônio Andrade de Moura
Juiz de Direito

And are relevant passages from today’s order from the relator, overruling the vandalism committed on his original ruling by the desembargador.

Todavia, é forçoso reconhecer que não foi determinado o bloqueio do sinal do site Yotube [sic]. Essa determinação, que é possível de ser tomada em caráter preventivo, como esclarece o jurista português JÓNATAS E. M. MACHADO [Liberdade de expressão: dimensões constitucionais da esfera pública no sistema privado, Universidade de Coimbra, 2002, p. 1123], deve ser emitida com clara fundamentação e com total transparência sobre o direito de liberdade de expressão e informação, que não comporta censura [art. 220, § 1º, da CF]. Impedir divulgação de notícias falsas, injuriosas ou difamatórias, não constitui censura judicial. Porém, a interdição de um site pode estimular especulações nesse sentido, diante do princípio da proporcionalidade, ou seja, a razoabilidade de interditar um site, com milhares de utilidades e de acesso de milhões de pessoas, em virtude de um vídeo de um casal.

Gist: It was never resolved, or implied, by the Court, that the YouTube.com domain would be blocked in its entirety.

Such a response would lead to suspicion of state censorship, and never be taken lightly.

A hint of irony creeps in to the next part, in which he thanks the Operators for their “hard work and eagerness to comply.”

I do, I have to say, love the Gongorismo of Brazilian legal prose.

5. O relator agradece o empenho com que as operadoras agiram quando receberam os ofícios do Juízo de Primeiro Grau, para que fosse cumprida a decisão. Acredita-se que o fechamento completo do sinal de acesso ocorreu por dificuldades técnicas de ser criado o filtro que impeça o acesso ao vídeo do casal. Mas, não foi essa a determinação, pois o que se ordenou foi o emprego de mecanismo que bloqueasse o acesso a endereços eletrônicos que divulgam o vídeo, cuja proibição foi determinada por decisão judicial. Não há, inclusive, referência para corte do sinal na hipótese de ser inviável a providência determinada.

What was determined was that a mechanism be employed that would block the URL of the video in question, whose banning was determined by judicial decision. But no reference was ever made to blocking the entire site if blocking the specific URL was found to be technically unfeasible.

For another alleged instance of tag-team judging and other procedural “innovations, ” check out the story of the “dossier scandal” as covered by Carta Capital magazine — Arrest, Detain, Then Discover the Crime.

So I think my analysis of the situation in this post — I added the Executive Summary a while back — is pretty well founded, now that that crucial point is clarified.

After four freaking days of reading all the coverage on this issue. &%@!!!!