Originally written by Pedro Paranaguá, in Brazilian Portuguese.

There’s much being heard and spread, here in Brazil and abroad, regarding the Cicarelli v. YouTube case — the blocking of YouTube due to the law suit filed by the model, ex-wife of Brazil´s Ronaldo, the Phenomena.

Understand here what has been occurring and the consequences that may arise from this very important case.

In September 2006, the Brazilian model and TV show hostess Daniela Cicarelli, ex-wife of Brazil´s Ronaldo, the football player, and her boyfriend, Renato Malzoni Jr., filed two lawsuits against YouTube, Globo Organizations and the Internet Group (iG), one of them claiming moral damages and the other, for taking the video off of the website.

The video was filmed by a paparazzo on a beach in Cadiz, Spain, and shows Cicarelli and Malzoni Jr., in public, caressing each other on the sand and in presumed sex scenes in shallow water. The video was taken to the Internet, in the famous Google’s video-sharing website YouTube, and finished resulting in the mentioned lawsuits.

YouTube is perhaps the most popular video-website on the Internet. According to the company, the videos put online on its servers are watched 100 million times a day. YouTube was bought in 2006 for US$ 1.6 billion by the U.S. company Google.

A preliminary injunction (a Judge´s order by which the merit of the issue is not analysed, however, due to the urgency of the case, an initial step is taken and later confirmed or not by the Court of Appeals) of the Sao Paulo State Court of Appeals (TJ-SP) , a second instance Tribunal, obliged the websites to take the video off, under a daily fine of R$ 250,000 (circa US$ 115,000) if the order was not complied. According to supposed declarations (Portuguese version) by Rubens Decossau Tilkian, Malzoni Jr.’s lawyer, the fine is being executed (charged), but the website-blocking is a way of enforcing the Brazilian Justice decision, which had not being complied – some say that YouTube had not complied with the Tribunal´s preliminary injunction order of blocking the video. According to that lawyer, “They [YouTube] do not have an effective system to prevent the video from being published / made available again”.

As the video was not blocked, despite the Court of Appeals´s order, Malzoni Jr. filed another lawsuit, last December, claiming for YouTube to be entirely blocked, filtered as a whole, not just the video.

On 02 January, Tuesday, the Judge of the 4th Chamber of Private Law of The Sao Paulo Court of Appeals (TJ-SP), Ênio Santarelli Zuliani, ordered under another preliminary injunction, and based on a technical opinion given by an expert commissioned by the Tribunal, that all the five Internet backbone companies in Brazil, which are responsible for the traffic information between foreign and national websites,

“promote the setting of filters on the access solicitation or on the response entrance of the U.S. website [YouTube], in order to completely block the access, by Brazilians, to the video of the couple.”

In other words, the Judge ordered that the access to the video should be fully blocked. However, he has not mentioned if, for that purpose, the whole website should be blocked as well. The order is that the video should be blocked. He has not explicitly ordered to block YouTube as a whole, but according to the interpretation of Malzoni Jr.’s lawyer, the Judge demanded the total blocking of the website.

From then onwards, there was an enormous confusion, and different news agencies, both in Brazil and abroad, started divulging that the Sao Paulo State Court of Appeals (TJ-SP) had ordered the total blocking of YouTube.

And, indeed, Brasil Telecom as well as Telefonica, from the following weekend, blocked YouTube entirely. More than 5 million people, approximately 25% of Brazilians connected to the Internet, had their access to YouTube completely shut down. Nothing else could be accessed, not even that friends’ video, or that funny kitten cat, or that magnificent lecture by one of the greatest specialists on Internet in the world, Eben Moglen: the whole thing was blocked.

Middest the generated confusion, the TJ-SP made a press release informing on 04 January that the Judge has not ordered the total blocking of YouTube, but only of the referred video.

Accordingly, on 09 January, the Judge issued a new document, clarifying that “the total blocking of YouTube´s signal had not been ordered”, further ordering the

"restoration of YouTube´s signal, and requiring that the backbone companies restore the access to the website and inform the Court of Appeals the technical reasons of the presumed impossibility of blocking the electronic addresses."

The Judge also explained that the decision of blocking the website "is generating a multitude of comments, which is natural due to the pioneer issue, which does not have a law support". Therefore, he admits that the actual legislation is not sufficient to deal with the case.

Complying with the Judge´s last order, the access to the YouTube website was immediately unblocked.

It is worth mentioning that the Judge´s decision is only on the preliminary injunction, and there will follow a final decision taken by the Court.

Now that you have understood the facts of the case, please await for a deep and critical analysis of the multiple issues involved, such as some legal aspects, the web neutrality, the inefficiency of filtering, the trespassing of filtering limits, the need for a new law as regards of the Internet Service Providers’ (ISPs) responsibility in Brazil, the legal uncertainty and the prejudice for the development of the web 2.0 in Brazil, and yet the worrying precedent that the case might bring, clouding the image of Brazil on the Internet governance.

Soon, here.

Still about the case, last Sunday, 14 January, the vice-coordinator of the Centre for Technology and Society (CTS) of Fundacao Getulio Vargas School of Law in Rio de Janeiro (FGV DIREITO RIO), Professor Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza gave an interview on the case for TV Globo´s Fantástico, the most popular TV Broadcaster in Brazil, and the second most watched TV show in the country, with over 30 million persons.