Human rights in a digital era

A new framework for digital rights ownership in the age of big data:

Today's economy is largely based on information, and that's nothing new in and of itself. Since the dawn of man, it has been known that information is power, and it is the unequal access to information, not money alone, that solidifies or topples existing structures of political and economic power. But unlike in every era gone by, today we have been able to distill and quantify information into its most basic bit form. The digital era has allowed us the technology required to cheaply and efficiently breakdown, store, and reintegrate information like never before. So it is meant quite literally, that today's economy is largely based entirely on information in it's rawest form. 

Unlike technological revolutions of previous eras, these abilities have become available to the majority of the population within a matter of a lifetime, rather than centuries. Printing took hundreds of years to become available to the commoner, and even then bibles were the only book most families could afford. In contrast, today there are 6 billion cellphone users. In a planet of over 7 billion, this is astonishing. 

Due to the shear speed of adaption to these new capabilities, many of them have been poorly integrated with old frameworks and ideas. For example, it makes very little sense that customers should be expected to pay for access to files of online content which can then be duplicated almost infinitely at effectively no extra cost to the buyer. Traditional pillars of supply and demand fall apart in the digital era. The music files themselves are essentially in limitless supply! We cannot let the success story that is the widespread use of digital technologies overshadow the ongoing struggle to comprehensively understand the implications and implement relevant guidelines for the new era. These implications undermine zero-sum thinking and traditional notions of capital. 

There have been a limited number effective attempts at providing a new structure of individual rights when it comes to their digital interactions. Notions of privacy and ownership have all been eschewed in favor of data mining and counter effective digital rights management or DRM controls. 

The push for literacy has long been a symbol of enlightened and democratic civilizations. But as we move beyond books and enter an age of bits, we must introduce a push for informational literacy that allows for a more democratic distribution and acquisition of information. It is no longer enough to know how to read. We have innumerable texts and files of all sorts that we can simply not find, or even access. This denial of access is often rooted in economical theories from an age of tangible goods, and political arguments for security. More and more often, sharing of information has become incriminating, and extremists would like the younger generations to identify sharing as either piracy or terrorism. 

More often than not, the flaw can be blamed on a less malicious mismanagement of resources: when the information is free and available and numerous, it is effectively off limits because of inefficient methods of retrieval and indexing. To put it simply, it can be extremely difficult to find original sources and reliable relevant content online. Searches are often cluttered by mess and muck. To deliver relevant content to members, libraries over the world have come to rely on basic indexing methods based on key terms and the Dewey decimal system. The internet based search engines also run on a system of index terms to retrieve content. However, there is currently a very limited democratic effort in qualifying the index terms themselves. Bots simply identify them, and clicks verify them. But clicks do not convey overt approval, only initial interest, so it is easy to see that the data is misconstrued to represent what is most impulsive, rather than substantive. In today's marketing and advertising era, it makes sense that these should be ranked highest. It is easy to perform better quality control within a town or university library, but what about online? There is a lot of muck to be sifted through, and a untold wealth to be earned by indexing and digitally distributing the information we produce. The only true service to be provided in the possibly near future of automation is the delivery and classification of information.

The need to adapt and verify fluidly: moving beyond digital feudalism 

While the word "picture" might qualify a file as an image, there is nothing to say that the word itself is even true until we actually check for ourselves. It could hypothetically be a music file, after all. Or to make things more complicated, it might be a song called Picture. And as the global vernacular is changing day by day, and cultures intermingle as never before, being able to search with one language only greatly limits the perspective of the interested individual. Those who speak no English have a greatly reduced access to the educational materials and information. 

Unlike libraries with static indexing or search engines ranked by payment for placement, there is an exciting alternative to indexing our exponentially increasing treasure chest of data. Most users of online information have inadvertently been contributing to the global economy through the release of their passive contributions to Meta-Data. Meta Data is the qualifying information about content and activity. We actively log our time, place, and condition hundreds of times a day through taking photos, uploading them, sharing liking and confirming other online behavior. Meta Data is also passively associated with the calls we make, the emails we send, and the ads we watch. 

Most of this Meta Data is seen as a free-for-all in the global economic and political scene. It is consistently being swept up and stored by companies that would like to know your purchasing preferences, and political agencies that would like to know your political preferences. Their unfettered access to this information gives them a greatly disproportionate level of power and control in determining which products we see, which information we receive, and the politicians we hear about. This Meta Data is all considered the "bread and butter" of the big data industry, which is set to be worth 17 billion by 2016. It is the fastest growing sector of the tech industry, and it is easy to see why. The ability to access, process and utilize information has long been the driving force in maintaining the status quo for those in power, and this grab-bag has been up for the taking so far. 

The individuals rights to the metadata being produced have largely been ignored, but it cannot go on forever. The value in meta data is far too great to go unspoken for by the people who create it. The current model of online interaction provides users with information services with greatly stunted methods of operation, and all heavily favor the corporate ability to capitalize from the work being done. The vast majority of online services such as Facebook and Twitter require individuals to enter into non-negotiable contracts that all serve a similar purpose: to strip the user of the metadata being self-generated,  to secure for the company any rights to package and sell user input to advertising agents. 

Are we serfs?

To quote the Facebook user agreement as it relates to advertising,

This means, for example, that you permit a business or other entity to pay us to display your name and/or profile picture with your content or information, without any compensation to you. 

As if this weren't enough, they continue to demand that...

you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP [Intellectual property] content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. 

This phenomenon of exploitation of labor isn't new. In the medieval age, serfs were guaranteed free and permanent plots, or "accounts" on the land they toiled. The grain they produced was centrally connected and distributed. In return, serfs got a portion suitable only for sustenance, while the owners of the labor were able to barter for great wealth. Their control of the food supply have them great leverage over the peasants they purportedly provided their protections to. The contracts signed and holding families to the land were non negotiable and based on debt. The serfs themselves had almost no say at all in the terms or conditions. The argument was that serfs needed to grow food anyways, so it shouldn't be considered work in the sense that they deserve compensation for it. Also, because the land they used was owned by nobility and graciously provided to them, they should naturally defer any potential financial proceeds to their benefactors and protectors. Contractually, the serfs were bound to the land and had no way of altering the agreement. Of course, we see these social political and economic constructs as faulty today, and have since evolved in many ways. 

But the parallels between this antiquated system, and our own digital reality are striking. Contract law has long been used to maintain control over those with less options. As free services and the terms and conditions therein rapidly become almost necessary to living in the modern world, individuals are often left with no real choice but to agree to contracts they have no democratic say in. And as our worlds political states lose more and more control to globalized corporations, we will find our lives more meaningfully controlled by closed institutions who see the individual as unwitting users, not participant and citizen. The first change that must come in our digital era must be the abolition of universal and nonnegotiable contracts that sign away the right to passively or actively generated intellection property. 

Secondly, the economic royalties generated by metadata should be strictly reserved for those who contributed the metadata in the first place. Providing the existence of new protections for individual contributors, earnings from digital contribution and distribution could theoretically become the norm for those who interact with online information frequently. There is very little logical reason for users to sign away valuable information if it is eventually being sold. The fact of the matter is, services like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are free because they are worth more as companies when they sell the information they harvest rather than the service they provide to their billions of users. This alienation of customer and consumer, service and product, will only become more and more toxic to the democratic function of our society as we accept more and more devices that passively collect our ideas and responses to experiences, products, and news. The new Xbox for instance, collects data on players heart beats, blood flow, and reaction to advertisements and in-game experiences. The purpose of course, is to increase the effectiveness of the media being pushed, and eventually the profit, being collected. Amazon's plans to introduce 30 minute shipping by drone also introduce the idea that we are providing them with up to date specifics on our home and location. The NSA already claims to only be searching for "meta data", but in light of this new proposal to consider the value of metadata, this is the most egregious claim of all. Digital capital is being hoarded at an unprecedented rate by institutions worldwide. 

Furthermore, despite the illusion of choice given to users who are told they can simply cancel their accounts with service providers  they no longer agree with, there is in reality no way to truly uproot from these digital domains. Deleting an account from Facebook does nothing to the masses of data produced by the individual that sits on their servers. It still services the profitability of their business model, long after the user has "left". The company even collects data from individuals not yet officially apart of their ecosystem. There is truly no freedom of mobility for online users or their data. Once it is collected, it is held indefinitely. Citizens cannot simply revoke their citizenship or affiliations with agencies that engage in dragnet surveillance. 

Meaningful public participation in the approval or disapproval of how information is being distributed is long over due. The age of static indexing as seen in libraries is over. It is no longer able to adapt quickly enough to changing vocabularies and additions to the catalogue. It is no longer capable of adapting to a variety of users who have differing perspectives, vocabularies, and understandings. The age of profit mined search results is hopefully coming to an end. It is no longer trustworthy in deliverance of truthful information. The highest bidders from traditional media sources find their way to the top of what were supposed to be democratic tools. The Youtube Awards were handed out to already famous artists at the expense of the grassroots performers who used Youtube as a peer to peer tool. With most media generating sites today, almost all the space is taken by ads, inadvertent posturing, or content providers that are either hidden behind paywalls or hiding politicized benefactors and bias. 

If the indexing of metadata that categorized and delivered the media was legally considered as a private contribution, and left to the very individuals concerned with providing and searching for the information, then the abuse or collection of said information could come under harsher penalty by those who continue to do so. New index terms could be added as often as users determine, and existing ones could be confirmed. If each confirming voice coincided with a quantified increase in the reputation or validity of the term as well as the user who created indexing term in the first place, then search results would be determined by a more balanced sense of what is the best result. No longer could the highest bidder's proposals find their way to the front pages, but rather those that are determined to be most truthful. 

If the rights to reputation and revenue generated by the valuable and truthful instances of metadata could be bought or sold, and each confirmation had the option of being accompanied by voluntary donations, it is easy to see how the Big Data industry could be unlocked to individuals who aren't representing or represented by powerful institutions of centralized data control. 

Under such a system, the very terms we agree to when it comes to social and  informational networking would be constantly reevaluated, and the most precise conditions in the eyes of the audience would generate the most reputation and reparation for the producing agent. 

To go back to the analogy of serfdom, adapting these provisions would be akin to allowing the free movement and relocation of serfs, and giving them the rights to barter trade and offer their own produce.

Where the metaphor differs however, is in the nature of the produce. There are only so many markets and types of grain that can be produced, giving individual farmers very little power in earning fair prices or developing ingenuity. But because most individuals specialize in various nuanced forms of information distribution, be it musical, technological, artistic, educational, linguistic, or political, we are all afforded the opportunity to build niche markets and unique products based on our interpretation of the content we provide or connect others with. Chances are, we already have. Such possibilities allow for a shorter distance between customers and businesses, which allows for greater social and economic benefits for both. 

This type of framework would also provide a useful link between the tangible markets of scarcity, and the intangible and digital markets that lack scarcity. Reputation itself, if quantified, flexible, and transferable, could allow for useful participation in the distribution and qualification of digit wares, but in the presence of two willing parties could be used in place of traditional forms of cash. 

And by freeing digital data from the confines of traditional economics, it is freed to the people. The property rights provided to individuals who created meta content allow for increased and longer lasting opportunities for earning reputation and financial compensation. It turn, this would allow for a more fluid exchange of ideas and benevolent sense of general reciprocity. 

The services we enjoy could still be offered free in and of themselves. The content itself, be it news, movies, or music, could be offered for free, while the creators earn their pay in return for the addition of valuable meta data, or negotiating individually for the rights to metadata provided by their core fans and users who add their own input. This of course is not happening under the current terms, by which the contracts are nonnegotiable, and sign over the majority of individual users' valuable contributions to the company hosting the servers. 

The nature of these proposed provisions would also undoubtedly shift the economical thinking of mankind to a more long term beneficial mindset. Because the products being bought and sold are in fact ongoing streams of compensation, rather than outright units like wheat or barley, their value would be determined based on their longevity of relevancy. Quality will once again have a notable place in modern economics, and quantity may finally take a backseat. 

All in all, this may or may not be the best or most probable solution to the current imbalance in economics and politics world wide. However, it is important to be discussing these ideas, because as the printing press before it, the internet will be used to increase the overall wealth and alter the beliefs of mankind. It is up to is to decide if that privilege should be held by centralized and archaic slow moving institution, or if every man should have a chance at developing the reality we are coming closer to sharing. 

The balance of power could eventually be tipped back into the hands of the Everyman. If we see ourselves, our minds, and the fruits of our labor as the playthings of those currently in control, as they were in the feudal ages, maybe - just maybe - we can take a page from history and build a better future.