O WordPress disabled last weekend the blog with supposedly criminal content that puts you at risk access to the service in Brazil. The portal changed its terms of use and deleted this and other pages framed in similar cases.

To carry out the embargo on a blog hosted on the site, in compliance with a determination of a judge of the 31st Civil Court of São Paulo, the providers said they would have to prohibit all access to the portal.

As the case runs in secret from Justice, there is no official information about the crime that caused the request for blog blocking. Marcel Leonardi, WordPress lawyer in this case, states that the blockade was decreed because of offenses made to a woman on the page. A user would have created a blog with the victim's name and used the site to post offenses to it.

Leonardi states that he was sought out by two other Brazilian lawyers who are responsible for lawsuits against this same practice – creating blogs with other people's names. So last week, WordPress decided to change its terms of use and no longer accept this type of procedure.

From now on, the website usage contract contains the following clause in free translation: "By providing content, you affirm and warrant that: (...) your blog does not have a name that can make your readers think you are someone else or company. For example, the URL or name of your blog does not have the name of a person other than yourself, or of a company other than yours."

With the change, the service disabled other blogs with this type of problem during the weekend.

The lawyer states that he must send to the Court still on Monday (5) a petition informing about the procedure, which, according to him, can take WordPress from the process and remove the risk of total embargo on service in Brazil. However, the process against the author of the blog continues.

Case

In March, the Justice of São Paulo sent a press release to Abranet (Brazilian Association of Internet Providers) to determine that its associates block access to a blog with criminal content. However, according to the institution, it is not possible to prohibit internet users from using only one page, and it is necessary to restrict access to the IP (internet protocol) of the site as a whole.

Last Monday (28), Leonardi filed a petition in Justice to prevent the blocking of the site in the country. In the document, he reported on alternatives that could be implemented by providers.

One would be to make a change to the DNS ("Domain Name Service") –system that translates addresses into IP numbers from where the websites are hosted– only from the forbidden blog. With this, by entering the name of the page in question, netizens could not reach it.

Another option would be to create a specific IP for the page in question, allowing the embargo. According to the lawyer, as the blog was disabled, these measures no longer make sense.