centered on the sharing of a wide range of materials -from syllabi, class notes and

tests to full copies of textbooks. Like Liveros de Humanas, Ebah was on the
receiving end of a lawsuit filed by ABDR. Unlike Livros de Humanas, Ebah managed to
settle65. As a condition of the settlement, Ebah now has a detailed section on
copyright in its website that reads as if it were wri-tten by the ABDR -as well as
strict takedown compliance66.

Because students will always share materials,the scope available o developers of

student-based services has been constantly tested by rights holders. In the words
of Passei Direto representative:
[The] materials are shared by the students themselves. So what we have is a team
focused on evaluating if the materials have correct names, if they are not in
infringement of copyrights.
...........That's basically it, we control the materials. Students are free to
upload, however. We don't curate ahead of time, we don't know how to predict what
the user is going to put on the platform. But the moment he does, we have to take
care of it [When we recieve a notice we usually have 48 hours to take down
materials. Usually, we do that within the day67.
In 2014, however, ABDR sued Passei Direto at the request of affliated publishers
Saraiva and Metodo, regarding alleged infringement of two books Passei Direto lost,
and the publishers were awarded around $190,000 (R$600,000)in damags, but the case
was settled as it reached the appellate court68. In 2016, two more plaintiffs - the
publisher Editora Manole and a law professor named Dimitri Dimoulis - sued Passei
Direto forcopyroght infringement. Both the cases are pending a final decision at
the time of this writing (Procedues 1005559-52.2016.8.26.0068 and 1014183-
812016.26.0071, Sao Paulo). In February 2017, Passei Direto disabled the download
function in its plat-forms. Files can now only be viewed within a window in the
site - a change that Passei Direto claims was implemented to "proctect the
authorship of the materials published by students and curb their unauthorized
reproduction"69.

Publishers- backed Platforms

As elsewhere, Brazilian publishers have focussed on institutional subscription-

based access models. The leading example is Minha Biblioteca,70 a platform
established by Grupo A, Grupo Editorial Gen, Atlas, Manole, and Saraiva - all major
publishers in the higher education market. Minha Biblioteca sells access directly
to universities, which then make the service available to their students. In 2014,
Minha Bibioceta took over administration of Pasta do Professor71 from the ABDR and
now also allows individual users to puchase full books or chapters.

Pearson's Biblioceta Virtual Universitaria is a similar service offering content

from sixteen publishers, and boasts serving 25 million active users with more than
four thousand tiltles, ranging from textbooks to monographs72. whether these
services effec-tively meet student requirements is an unanswred question. In
effect, institutional subscrip-tions became a viable business in Brazil only after
2012, when the Ntional Evaluation System For Higher Education added access to
online databases to the criteria for evalu-ating university libraries73.
As explained by Mauro Koogan of Grupo Gen, one of Minha Biblioteca's founder.

We started [Minha Biblioteca]two years ago, with difficulty and now we have almost
500,000 students with access to the library. Basically, the Ministry of Education
said "Universities, we know you do not have the means to buy [books], so we'll take
digital libraries into consideration in the score you get [in our evaluation]". So
unversities say "hey now that interests me". But if you're going to analyze the use
that students make of this library, which has almost six thousand titles now, it's
very low74.
Open Licensing
Brazil has a very strong open access community, with public support for both tradi-
tional peer-reviewed "gold"