Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved - New York Times kinds of local scenes that utilize universal elements," like Brazilian, South African and Arab rap. As a Tropicalista, Mr. Gil was also involved in an episode that is Brazil's equivalent of Bob Dylan being booed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. When the Tropicalistas played electric guitars and rock rhythms at a São Paulo song festival in 1967, they were jeered and accused of being agents of American imperialism who were trying to impose noxious foreign influences on Brazilian music. 03/11/2007 09:36 AM Mr. Gil's complaints about the inequities of copyrights are derived in part from his own experience. Like many other musicians he signed contracts early in his career that essentially gave away publishing rights to the songs he wrote. But he waged a seven-year court battle to regain his rights, which ended recently with a favorable ruling that opens the door for other Brazilian artists to regain their rights as well. "The old contracts were completely concessionary, in which all rights over the work were ceded to the contract holder, in absolute form," he said. “I fought to bring my own work back under my control, arguing that there exists a unilateral right to break the contract. And we won. It was the first time this happened in Brazil, based on an artist's rescinding a contract, and without a negotiated accord.” Now that Mr. Gil has regained ownership of his own catalog of more than 400 songs, he is putting the concept of “copyleft," as the alternative system is sometimes called, into practice. He retains all rights on some songs, some rights on others and declaring "no rights reserved" on others, which are now free for others for use in remixes or videos. With such an approach an artist "no longer needs to transfer the administration of his rights to an entity called the record company, the movie studio or the song publisher," Mr. Gil said. “He can do it himself.” DESPITE all his brushes with politics over the years, it was only at the end of the '80s, when he was elected to the City Council here in Brazil's third-largest city, that Mr. Gil ventured into conventional party politics. His constituency was an unusual mixture of poor and working-class blacks and middle-class, mostly white, environmentalists. But he withdrew after one term, turning aside requests he run for Brazil's Congress by saying he was tired of partisan bickering and wanted to resume his performing career. Many Brazilians were therefore surprised when he jumped back into politics after the country's first left-wing government was elected in 2002 and he was offered the cabinet post of culture minister, and then again late last year when he agreed to stay on for a second term. “I still don't like politics," he said. “I'd rather see my position in the government as that of an administrator or manager. But politics is a necessary ingredient. You have politics in the government, with ministers, on the issue of how the budget is divided, the cake sliced up, the distribution of resources. You have to choose priorities, to tend to some and not to others." Mr. Gil's tenure has not been without controversy. He is a member of the Green Party, not the ruling Workers' Party, so when he was first appointed, some party loyalists were miffed that the job had not gone http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/arts/music/llroht.html?_r=1&oref-slogin&pagewanted=print Page 4 of 5