Hoping to mollify the Reagan Administration and avoid the threat of $105m of punitive sanctions on its exports to the US, Brazil’s president has signed an order that sets new rules for controlling the import of software: for a program to be banned from import, the Special Informatics Secretariat will have to decide that an original local program, developed independently, performs the same functions as the foreign one, runs on similar equipment, gives comparable performance, gives the same result when data is fed into it as does the foreign program, and is as user friendly; and individuals will also be permitted to import single copies of otherwise banned programs if they are for their personal use only.
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