Slashdot Mirror
Facebook, Google, and Intellectual Property
Scott Jaschik sends us to Inside Higher Ed, where a librarian explains why the tradeoffs we're facing with social networking sites — e.g. privacy vs. a space to build one's personal "brand" — echo issues faced years ago by academics who publish in journals that their institutions' libraries can not then afford. The author argues that, as the Open Access movement is busily restructuring academic publishing, we need to find a way of retaining the personal value to the individual of social networking and Web 2.0 sites, and not allow that value to be eclipsed by the commercial worth of the data the sites obtain about us. In the author's view, the tension is in "...the fundamental relationship between the individual's desire to share their thoughts and experiences with others and the commercial entities that provide the distribution channel for that act of sharing."
I certainly espouse the ideals of human rights, but the gp points out that these rights are only as strong as any given government's will to protect them. Not only that, but it is possible to read this sort of protection as imposition (see the problems with Islamic head-scarfs in secular countries such as the Netherlands and Turkey).
I also disagree that the content of certain human rights spring up spontaneously. What we know as human rights is a Western import, and thus inspired by Christianity (not even stemming from Greco-Roman philosophy, which had no concept of the universal rights of human beings, only citizens).
I do believe that what we consider human rights are simply the embodiment of a 'beneficial' swing in the movement of what Nietzsche called the will to power. I mean (to put in the least technical language possible): the strongest wins, and luckily (for us) the winning side espouses human 'rights' that concur with our opinions, which is only natural because these our the basis of our culture.