Right to Information and Privacy

Although it may not be spelled out in the Constitution as such, I believe that the right to information is vital for the functioning of a society that wishes to truly call itself free. For people to truly be able to act freely, make decisions on their own and really be independent human beings, they must have access to the information that allows them to do these things.

What about human beings in general, though, outside of governmental structure? Is access to information a fundamental human right? I still believe it is. After all, most of the ways information is restricted from people (censorship, private economic benefit, etc.) are constructions made either by humans or the government. We are only cutting ourselves or others off from information – there is nothing inherent in our being or in nature to say we shouldn’t have access to as much information as we want.

It is also true that with the flood of information we have these days that privacy seems to be slipping away. For a number of reasons, I think that individual privacy is something that people simply expect themselves to have less of today than they used to. I think this is a worrying trend. It may take more effort, and we may well have to take more of the responsibility of it into our own hands, but I think that every individual still has a right to privacy that should be maintained and respected. To put it bluntly, just because our ethics haven’t caught up to our technology doesn’t mean we should give up on privacy altogether.

Copyright

Copyright is a concept that, on a surface level, doesn’t seem all that difficult to deal with. Someone creates something and then they own it. Simple, right?

Not so much, unfortunately.

The primary issues with copyright stem from when one person tries to use another’s creations or ideas in his or her own work. It’s fairly easy to see that many of the best creative works come from building upon or using in some way someone else’s ideas. Therefore, if you have any respect for artistic freedom anyway, it’s fairly easy to agree that the use of other’s creations should be allowed, at least to some extent.

The problem comes from trying to define that extent. Essentially, creating laws regarding content use is trying to regulate creativity, which is obviously kind of difficult as every case will be somewhat different. This is not to say that I think regulating copyright is entirely bad, as it is certainly possible to rip off another work too heavily and there needs to be some control for that.

My personal stance on copyright laws is that they need to be fairly lax. Creativity needs to have freedom in order to create the best artistic product. While some control is needed, the law shouldn’t get in the way of artistic creation. Art in this work faces enough problems as it is. Unfortunately, with the huge influence large money-hungry corporations have on politics these days, I see money becoming the main factor in deciding copyright issues, not art, and this worries me because I think it has serious implications for what will be possible for future creators in this country.

Evil, Terrible, Corrupting Books of Doom

Looking through the list of most frequently challenged books was definitely surprising to me. Some of those listed are more obvious than others, but some I never even thought would be a problem to anyone. I’ve read quite a few of them myself, as well.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic controversial book because of some of the issues it deals with, but I don’t think that it’s anything that is too dangerous for today’s children (at least at a certain age) to deal with, as long as the context is explained and the book is discussed. It may be controversial, but it’s definitely a classic.

The fact that the Harry Potter series is on the list just makes absolutely no sense to me. There’s no logical reason whatsoever that the books should be banned based on their subject matter, save for the fact that some parts in the later books may be a bit scary or sad.

I was completely addicted to the Goosebumps series as a kid and I seem to have turned out all right. I had shelves of those things. Again, I don’t see what the problem is; they were simply mystery stories with a hint of the paranormal – nothing dangerous or even really controversial.

I’ve read others on the lists (A Wrinkle in Time, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, among others) and there are some that I haven’t but know about, but there are very few that I think have any reason to be on there (I will admit that I don’t think I’d want my children reading Sex by Madonna or Private Parts by Howard Stern).

The vast majority of these books don’t belong on this list and some are absolute classics that should be read by all children, not kept from them. Even the few that actually do contain subjects children shouldn’t see need to be kept from them by their parents, not by banning the books in the libraries, preventing anyone at all from reading them. Trying to get a book banned in a library is an extreme and unnecessary reaction. What these people should really be doing is either education parents or taking more responsibility for their own parenting.

Information as a Product

The economics behind information itself is something I had never really stopped to consider until reading this chapter, which is kind of strange considering how interested I am in technology - the Internet in particular. The two concepts do seem to fit together pretty well.

Obviously there has to be an economy for producing new information and there is an economy for putting the information in containers and selling those, but forming an economy around the information alone still seems somewhat foreign to me.

Maybe this can be explained by the fact that since I grew up with computers and the Internet, the idea of information as something freely available and easily sharable is somewhat ingrained into my way of thinking. Treating information, which is something intangible, the same as a product you’d buy off the shelf of a store (the details are different, obviously, but just as a general idea) seems not only unusual to me, but also perhaps kind of wrong.

With just a simple search term in Google you can find out just about anything you could want to know. The Internet, one of the only mediums that makes selling information outside of a container even possible, also renders the idea pretty much unnecessary by its very nature.

If you include intellectual property in your definition of information, then there are some decent examples of models selling information without a container. For instance, consider Apple and its iTunes store which sells music without any type of container and also includes protection (at least on most of its content for the time being) to keep the content exclusive to that service.

So, just because it seems strange and has never really occurred to me before doesn’t mean the idea can’t work, apparently.