Digital Civil Rights

As the term implies, digital civil rights in its most general formulation refers to the distribution of social justice, or civil rights, within the context of information management. This emerging field of discourse takes as its point of departure the protection of individual rights and protections vis-a-vis government and corporate institutions. On one hand, digital-civil-rights advocates aim to protect and encourage widespread access to information digitized as electronic data, whether graphical, audio, or text-based. On the other hand, digital civil rights involves advocacy of protection of individual privacy rights from unwarranted intrusion and/or exploitation on the part of corporate, government, or individual sources. These two broad mandates entail a host of intellectual-property and "cyber-crime" issues --from music and movie piracy to the security of individual financial data for online comercial transactions, as well as the regulation of online technology with regard to marketing and other business practices.

The issue of equal access to Internet technology for all demographic groups in the US has been discussed in the contex

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issent and manufacturing consent. Global corporate interests are firmly in the driving seat, with governments relegated to referee between monoliths wrestling for the greater share of spoils. Scant attention is paid to international regulation and the implications for people and social development (cited by Fleming 3). To put it another way, the issue of access to technology-related social goods is marginalized while the commercial potential of the Internet is exploited to the fullest. This issue points to a second designation of the term information sharing, which has to do with peer-to-peer file sharing, in which corporations have an interest. That is a point to which this research will return. The agenda of an organization called European Digital Rights, or EDRI, overlaps to some degree with that of CRIS. Organized in 2003 in Brussels, EDRI is a coalition of European privacy and civil-rights organizations focusing on issues of copyright, privacy, and the Internet. The group concerns itself with a range of subjects--"from data retention to copyright and software patents, from the transfer of passenger data to freedom of speech online and the security and privacy problems arising from e-voting" (EDRI). In a biweekly newsletter,
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Some common words found in the essay are:
, Brussels EDRI, CRIS CRIS, Fisher A23, Persons Disabilities, CRIS Campaign, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Iraq Fleming, Union EDRI, EU Parliament, information society, data retention, civil rights, june 2005, digital civil, digital civil rights, information sharing, rights information society, rights information, european digital rights, communication rights information, persons disabilities, employment persons, issue access, committee employment persons,
Approximate Word count = 1503
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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