The Internet and the freedom of speech is a complex and controversial issue. It involves two contradictory terms: The Internet control and censorship on the one hand and the freedom of speech on the other.

People have been opposing to any kind of censorship, whether on political or social issues, within borders of a given country or globally for many years.

Before, the governments muffled the public’s mouth and didn’t allow people to voice their dissatisfaction of the governing authorities (as it was in e.g. Morocco under King Hassan II or under Stalinism in Poland or the Soviet Union).  Freedom of speech has become an important weapon against any national oppression and injustices. Thanks to it, many important social changes could occur, though not always along with total acceptance of grassroots as with the feminist movement or the gay rights movement. Before winning the privilege of freedom of speech, all the opposition was brutally cracked down. Yet different groups kept sacrificing and didn’t give up but continued  the fight for their freedoms, like the civil rights activist, Martin Luther King did.

After all these turbulent years and all the sacrifice, we have entered a new era of social and political challenges, an era of cyber dominance with all its goodies and threats. Will the Internet and its users fall victim to the cyber dictatorship that will deprive us of all the rights we have already been granted?

The line between the freedom of speech and a breach of law is very thin. But what is meant with a breach of law depends on who establishes the law and its limits.

Cyber party

Internet Privacy

There are no unified laws and regulations  protecting users. EU policy differs vastly from the US one: the EU Community raises a question about data protection and the US focuses debate on PRIVACY.

A number of websites either sell or just give freely your personal information such as your full name, address, marital status, phone number and other information (DOB, your financial standing, Social Security Number and so on). Your data are collected from publicly-available sources (court records, marriage and birth certificates, voting records etc.). Any site you visit can tell who your provider is, where it is located, what you do while you are there and what software you are using.

Many sites want you to register in order to use their services. You may be asked to give your real name, and e-mail address, your physical address, your telephone number, your income level, your interests, etc. This can be valuable information for someone unwanted.

Beware of cookies!   

Often the sites we have visited and registered on remember us as a visitor. How come? Well, they have planted a cookie on our system with information about us. When we connected, our cookie files were checked to see if we were a registered user, and if we had elected to store our username and password in the cookie. Cookies may or may not be encrypted. There is another type of cookie that keeps track of logins. It remains in our RAM while we stay connected. But here we have an option: not to give access to cookies in our browsers. If we do so, we will just have to retype the username and password every time we log in to the same website. Well, not a big deal after all!

Here’s another cookie-deuce: in some cases cookies may be generated by another site, not the one we have entered. It can be for instance some advertising agency providing services for a number of other web sites.

Cookies make it easier for us to get around but let's think twice if we really want to have them.

Be careful what you send and write in e-mail messages!

Remember a hotmail scandal when someone hacked into hotmail accounts?

Or another one with facebook accounts?

For a hacker it is easy to get our account details, password and user name, or to set up so called "sniffer" software to monitor e-mails we send or e-mails containing our name, for instance. Sniffers enable the third party even to see exactly what we are doing on the computer in a given moment. Planting spywares is common for advertizing companies. When we buy some software or game and install it on our computers, we let this unwanted guest enter our systems without even being aware of the fact.

Because of all this there are lots of dangers lurking for us, average netizens. To name

a few  we can fall victims of stalking, hacking or  identity theft, our name can get on spam mailings. 

All online activities should be carried out via anonymizers.

E-mails and web browsing should be encrypted and

we should beware of what information we give, where and to whom!

Another Cyber Hacking Victim

The issue of privacy and control of individuals has reached an unexpected dimension. The Internet, on the one hand, is a powerful tool to spread information and on the other, to control or steal it. Average cybercitizen is unaware of all the dangers lurking out there in the cyber space, unaware of constant surveillance and unaware that there is no possibility to hide or escape.

Intellectual Property

We have two categories of IP:

Industrial property (trademarks, patents);
Copyright (literary, musical and artistic works: films, paintings, sculptures, drawings and architectural designs, art performances, even radio and television programs).

The right to intellectual property protects the owner from others making copies of his work without authorization.

                                                                       Intellectual theft

Within the legislature we can name:
           the right to control the act of reproduction, e.g. the reproduction of books by
           a publisher, the manufacture of records by a record producer;
           the right to authorize distribution of copies of works;
           the right to authorize rental of copies.

In the era of technology it is very easy to download and copy films, music and other types of works via free programs available on the Internet.

Mind you!

 
There are few exceptions where we can freely use parts of others' works without any authorization, such as:

using illustrations for teaching purposes,
using works for news reporting,
using quotations from protected works but with the author’s name given.

Strict regulations and their execution could protect many from intellectual theft, unfair competition, plagiarism or brand piracy whether just online or in real life.

Intellectual Property Rights on the Internet

We need to be very careful of what kind of stuff AVAILABLE on the Net we use and to which purposes. We often forget about intellectual rights of the authors that (pieces of) works we “borrow” just because everything seems to be so easily AVAILABLE on the Internet. It’s usually not the authors themselves who have given away their works to the wide cyber audience.

The Internet is a vast source of information and that creates a dilemma: what kind of information and who can have the access to it? Should we impose any sort of censorship or restrictions to what kind of information should be available? If yes, who then, how and to what extent?

First let’s ponder over who actually owns the Internet:  

Nobody or everybody?

On the one hand, there are organizations that decide on how the Internet's structure looks like and how it works, but they don't own the Internet itself. On the other hand, the Internet consists of a myriad of different bits and pieces, each of which has an owner. Some of these owners can control the level of access we have to the Internet and can have a powerful influence on our experience of it.

Internet Censorship in China - FB blocked

  Have governments the right to control the
  information flow?

  The People's Republic of China has 
  introduced laws and administrative  
  regulations to implement censorship
  systems. The governmental authorities have
  the right to block website contents and
  monitor the Internet access of individuals:

                                                

 

Protests Against New Anti-Piracy Laws

On Sunday, February 12 in many European countries there were staged protests against implementation of EU-wide anti-piracy legislation, so called ACTA  - the Anticounterfeiting Trade Agreement, which was signed on January 26 by the EU. The legislation aims to thwart copyright piracy in entertainment, fashion, pharmaceuticals and computer software but the opponents see the legislation as a threat against Internet freedoms

The European legislation is similar to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an anti-piracy bill introduced by the US Congress in October 2011 to stop online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.

                                             Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet Freedom

                                             

                                                                    Criticism of SOPA

                 

Should we let anyone publish any sort of information on the Internet or should we agree to imposed limitations?