The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre published new research today finding no evidence to back up assertions made by the RIAA, IFPI, and other recording organizations that piracy displaces digital music sales.  The study followed the clickstream of 16,290 European consumers aged 10 to 75 for an entire year as they navigated the web and interacted with sites defined by the study as “illegal download sites,” “legal streaming sites,” and “legal purchasing sites.”  The study showed a 10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading sites provided a 0.2% increase in clicks on legal purchasing sites, suggesting a statistically insignificant relationship between piracy and online music sales.   The study also found a small but relatively insignificant relationship between legal online streaming sites and music purchases, with a 10% increase in clicks on legal streaming sites producing a 0.7% increase in online music purchases.  The study concluded “that the majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to them.”

The relationship between piracy and online digital sales has been a hotly debated issue between recording organizations like the RIAA and their detractors.  While a significant amount of research has been done on the link between piracy and hard-copy music sales, little has been done on the link between piracy and digital purchases (which make up nearly 34% of recording industry revenues).  The RIAA and their ilk have suggesting that online piracy has had a direct impact on the decline in both hard and soft-copy music sales, pointing to studies that focus primarily on the former.  Other studies cited by the RIAA have even suggested that piracy has had a significant negative effect on American job growth and economic output.

However, many of these studies have relied on the flawed assumption that an illicit download equals a lost sale. This kind of flawed methodology makes it difficult to gather a true picture of the impact piracy has on album sales, both digital and hard-copy.  A slew of opposing studies, including one from 2007 in the Journal of Political Economy, have suggested that the relationship between piracy and decreasing album sales is “not statistically distinguishable from zero.”  One study from May 2012 by a Vanderbilt University professor has even suggested that piracy helps increase album sales during the album’s initial release. These studies hypothesize that the drop in album sales could be attributed to the increasing number of independent record labels gaining more market share and the desire among music consumers today to purchase a single song for a significantly discounted price rather than an entire album, a luxury that was not available in the early 2000s.

This most recent study from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre is one of the first major studies on the effect of piracy on digital music sales.  Its findings may significantly dampen the arguments made by the industry for tougher copyright legislation and increased penalties on copyright infringement.

While the effect of piracy on both digital and hard copy album sales remains difficult to truly discern, online subscription services such as Spotify and LastFM have proven to have a significantly positive impact on digital music revenues.  IFPI recently released figures in February showing its first increase in revenue since 1999. According to IFPI’s figures, online subscription services jumped remarkably in 2012 and account for nearly 10% of the industry’s revenue.

The rise in the use of legal online subscription services could be one reason for the significant drop in piracy over the past two years.  According to a recent study by the NPD Group, the number of users consuming peer-to-peer services dropped 17% between 2011 and 2012, with a 44% drop in the number of files burned and ripped from CDs, a 25% drop in the number of files swapped from hard drives, and a 28% drop in the volume of music downloads from digital lockers.  Several critics attribute this drop in music piracy largely to the increase in spyware and digital subscription services like Spotify.

Many questions remain – will these trends in piracy continue? Will online streaming services affect film and television piracy in the same way?  Is piracy even to blame for the loss in revenue attributed to the film and recording industries?  Hopefully additional studies will provide a clearer picture of this relationship and help inform the debate over copyright legislation that is sure to make its way back to Congress.

Within the interactive map of ports released, clicking on the pie charts on highlighted regions will open colored circles (one for each date an event occurred); clicking within each circle will show the specific reference (and source) of the disruptive event. In Hong Kong for instance, there have been 102 mentions of protests in the past 20-some days.

Although the overall data visualization map is clean and attractive, once you begin to dig more deeply into the data and sources, it’s clear that though there is useful information that can be culled, there are also potential issues with the accuracy (and legitimacy) of the sources. For instance, below the Indian Ocean there is a large pie chart that contains sources with “no location specified” (1040 references). Clicking on one from January 2nd, it’s a “armed attack” report from qnlink.com: “LA photographer killed while shooting Bieber’s car” Though fact checking against other sources confirms that this report is true; it’s description, locational tag, and even mention on this intelligence map is puzzling. It is an instance of violence in a port city, but this event is almost certainly unrelated to the security of the Los Angeles port. Beyond that, it was listed in “no location specified,” when there is clearly a location specified in the snippet, and the photographer was hit by a car; it wasn’t an “armed attack.”

However, other portions of the map contain useful data that could serve as an early warning for those concerned about the security of these ports. For example, a tweet from @mrbaopanrui on December 31st “MT @SCMP_News: HK Jan 1 protests.@SCMP_News is covering it live tmrw. Send us your tweets #hkprotests.” This tweet is certainly forward facing, and offers information that could affect the security of Hong Kong’s port, but the legitimacy of the source does likely require further investigation. Looking more closely, his Twitter profile contains both his name and a link to his about.me page, a search on linkedin collaborates his identity as a journalist in SE Asia.

Recorded Future is one of the first companies to aggregate multiple open sources of internet data (Facebook, Twitter, news articles etc.), but there have actually been many efforts to quickly detect and model geopolitical events using online and mobile communications in recent years. Google’s Flu Trends uses CDC data to model the likelihood of flu off of search trends for flu-related queries. Ushahidi is a crowdsourcing platform created to map violence in Kenya (using web and mobile reports) in 2008 during the post-election fallout. Based on the success of this reporting system, several nonprofits have created similar tools. Specifically, the recent violence stemming from the democratic revolution in Syria yielded Syria Tracker and Threatened Voices also recently created a similar crowd sourced map tracker with reports of threatened or arrested bloggers.

Like Recorded Future, these models do often require examination to verify legitimacy, as well as filter out the spam and duplicate reports, but they do illustrate how much smaller our world is growing: from my kitchen table in San Francisco, I can view descriptions of violent events in Syria from those who just experienced them. What I find so fascinating about this data and connectivity transformation is that as we become more and more connected, it becomes less and less likely that the validity or accuracy of violent events, humanitarian issues, genocide, etc. could be contested. Businesses, governments, and NGOs not only have access to this data, the open source nature of this data puts additional onus on these parties to react to this information.

As these tracking, modeling, and early warning tools continue to evolve and improve in 2013 and beyond, they will hopefully also lead to even more intelligent responses from those in a position to influence these events and issues.

The proposed tax for renewal would look like this:

1. A free 12-year copyright term for all new works.
2. After 12 years, a 12 year renewal (cost 1% of revenue from first 12 years).
3. After 24 years, a 6 year renewal (cost 3% of revenue from the previous 12 years).
4. After 30 years, a 6 year renewal (cost 5% of revenue in previous 6 years).
5. After 36 years, a 10 year renewal (10% of ALL overall revenue).

This would allow a work to be copyrighted for a total of 46 years, much lower than the current copyright term (especially for corporations). Of course, the pros and cons of a shorter copyright term are heavily debated, but for the moment let’s assume it was decided that 46 years were enough.

iPhone revenues are still growing, and it now generates about $100billion a year for Apple. Of course, there are likely to be fluctuations in revenue, changes in the product landscape, and economic impacts such as inflation over 46 years, but for matter of curiosity let’s also assume that Apple makes $100billion a year for 46 years on the iPhone. That is $4.6trillion.

It should also be mentioned that there are number of copyrights associated with the iPhone, so actual implementation is much more complex than a single 46-year iPhone copyright. Moreover, there is a difference between a patent and a copyright, both of which apply to the iPhone.

If we follow the rules above, the first 12 year copyright renewal would cost Apple $12billion. The second 6 year renewal would cost $36billion. The third would cost $30billion. And the final 10 year renewal would cost a whopping $460billion. Total, for 46 years of iPhone copyright, it would cost Apply $538billion.

Combined with every other copyright out there, it could make a big dent in the deficit. It could, arguably, also help spur creative innovation by implementing a shorter copyright term.

However, the manpower needed to track the revenue generated from a copyright and the team of lawyers required to work out the law for each case could negate the foreseeable benefits. On top of that, the drawbacks to economic activity are even less predictable, so it’s not entirely clear if a company like Apple would even exist to make big payouts if this tax regime were implemented.

It’s not surprising that the RSC policy brief was removed from the RSC website shortly after it was published, as its recommendations do go against many of the big business financial supporters of the Republican Party.

Early this week, militant missiles from Gaza prompted military action from Israel, and the conflict appears to be escalating. Initial reports suggest 50-100 people have died and hundreds more are injured. On Friday, Hostess announced it would be closing shop, threatening the existence of the iconic Twinkie baked cake.

Here is a Google Trends graph in the U.S. for the past seven days. The term “hostess” (red line) has reached an all time high, while the term “israel” (blue line) still hasen’t surpassed the interest it received during the short-lived conflict between Israel and Lebanon in 2009.

Even though the Twinkie is likely to survive the Hostess closure, Americans have raided stores and have pushed up prices for the remaining lot.

To be fair, happenings in the Israel-Palestinian conflict are much more common, so the news is less of a shocker. Nevertheless, America’s selective attention may be cause for concern. Without outcries for peace from the American public, future U.S. impact on the peace process is more likely to be benign.

Today it was announced that Disney is buying Lucas Arts for $4.05 billion, which transfers all Star Wars rights to Disney. The move will fortify the Disney/Stars Wars brand through copyright, and it will undoubtedly result in several more abominable Star Wars movie sequels.

Disney has a history of buying iconic brands and locking up the copyright. The company acquired Marvel back in 2009, and since then Disney has released an increasing number of Marvel movies and merchandise. Between the purchase and 2015, there are going to be at least 17 major Marvel movies, which is almost as many as the entire first decade of the millennium, one of the most recent movies grossing $1.5 billion worldwide, and many of which are remakes or sequels.

Disney’s agressive elaboration of the Marvel brand will likely fortify its hold on the copyrights for generations to come. Although Marvel started creating comics in 1939, Disney’s reworking of the story lines and character profiles will allow them to claim copyright for even longer under current copyright law to some extent if they are able to prove unique derivative work. To put it simply, as long as a corporation continues to develop and recreate its owned copyright, it can claim ownership to a unique adaptation of that work. No wonder we have seen an influx of comic book movies in the past decade (see chapter 17 of Tim Wu’s “The Master Switch”). Disney/Marvel need to renew a piece of that copyright claim before it runs out.

George Lucas likes this, and he has bought into the idea of preserving the Star Wars image as much as possible. For him, it’s not about making more money out of Star Wars (he’s already made enough for several lifetimes). It’s about making sure Star Wars remains true to its origins: George Lucas and the image of George Lucas. Check out his interview for his reasoning for selling the company to Disney (especially 2:27):

He says, “I’m doing this so the films will have a longer life. More fans and people can enjoy them in the future.” Kathleen Kennedy, the Co-Chariman of Lucas Film, adds, “The main thing is to protect these characters and to make sure that they continue to live in the way [Lucas] created them.”

In doing so, they will prevent the remix of Star Wars for at least the next hundred years (probably more). Disney has already announced that it will be making three new Star Wars movies in the next several years, and it plans to release more after that, one every “2 or 3 years”. As Joe Mullin from arstechnica.com concludes, we can expect many more stories and characters that will be protected via copyright, thus renewing the copyright into the unforeseeable future.

The copyright for the Star Wars franchise is already secure beyond the lifespan of its creator, George Lucas. Star Wars was released in 1977, which give Lucas Arts control until 2072, 95 years after its creation. This is due to the increased length of the copyright term law over the past couple hundred years. Check out the change in this graph:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

This is plenty incentive for an artist to create great work. But this isn’t about artists, it’s about the institutions that claim the copyright (e.g. Lucas Arts, Disney), and their capacity to use these rights to generate more ‘culture’. Indeed, the lobbying of corporations for stricter copyright law has paid off (at least for the corporations), and ironically, Disney has been a major proponent of longer copyright terms, even though its entire collection of iconic movies (Snow White, Alice In Wonderland, etc.) are based on works that had been out of copyright when Disney was just starting out. Now Disney’s efforts have made it impossible for anyone in the next several generations to do the same with its own work.

For a brief history of copyright, check out the video below. Funny enough, it is explained through the eyes of the Star Wars copyright, and Disney is used as a case study for how institutions are milking the copyright system. Props to C. G. P. Grey for creating this video over a year before the Lucas Arts purchase:

Lucas Arts has fiercely defended its claim to Star Wars, usually successfully (but not always). When the company released some online tools in 2007 to help fans remix Star Wars content, copyright activist Lawrence Lessig called the move “digital sharecropping”, making reference to the fact that none of the remixers actually had any right to any of their own work.

Is this good for culture overall? Well, if the Star Wars prequel trilogy and the Marvel revival work as a predictor, we are in for a sad Star Wars future.

Editor’s note: In response to article comments, the author would like to clarify that the article’s main concern rests in derivative works. For this, a number of edits were made post-publish. Reference to a WIPO article was removed, as it was noted as off target and confusing. In it’s place, the concept of derivative works were more clearly referenced and cited, and their capacity to be copyrighted. Tim Wu’s “The Master Switch” was referenced for the phenomenon of increased elaboration of current copyrighted brands. Also, it was originally stated that ClubJade.net created the copyright video featured above, but they pointed out that it was in fact C. G. P. Grey.

Below is a Google Trend graph showing the relative increase in the number of searches for “voter fraud” over the last 12 months. Each ticker represents a major news story (most of them about Republican vote fraudsters).

Here’s the same graph over the past 90 days, except broken out between “democrat voter fraud” (blue) and “republican voter fraud” (red). Notice the domination of GOP-related searches.

In terms of general interest in “voter fraud”, most searches are happening in northern states, such as Minnesota and Wisconsin. This is undoubtedly due to the recent billboard campaign in some Midwestern states against voter fraud. However, there are many claims that the campaign was actually intended to intimidate minority voters not to show up for the election.

Major news outlets have been quick to report on any claims of voter fraud, and the reports have become more regular over the past few weeks. The reports have been especially hard on Republican candidate Mitt Romney for his alleged connections to the companies that manufacture voting machines. Voting machines definitely make this faster and easier, but it’s entirely possible to hack a machine (or programing from the beginning) to do one party’s bidding.

Fortunately, however, all the new technology in the election does make oversight easier for the majority of the population (at least to a certain extent), so new election technologies should be welcomed. There have been grassroots reports of historical inconsistencies of GOP voter habits, and many reports of fraudulent voter registration are captured on video via smartphone by everyday people. A number of institutions have also contributed to better, cleaner voting, such as TurboVote, which keeps voters informed on polling information, and Google Politics & Elections team, which has created a portal for all election news and research.

Amidst government threat letters and millions in venture funding, we estimate that ride-sharing startups such as Sidecar and Lyft now make up one-third of the drivers in San Francisco. Initial reviews also suggest that ride-sharing is faster, cheaper, and more pleasant than a traditional taxi service, but can these new startups build credibility around their service?

In just over a year, the startups have grown to make up about one-third of the drivers in San Francisco. Sidecar has announced a promotion for the 500th driver signup, and a recent email from the Lyft community manager confirms about 250 Lyft drivers in San Francisco. Give or take a couple of hundred from smaller, no-quite-the-same companies such as Zimride, we can put the number of drivers in the city at about 700-900. On the other end, traditional taxi companies have a driver force of about 1,750 in the city (approaching 2,000 according to my cabbie this morning).

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that ride-share drivers make up one-third of the drivers on the street at any given time. After all, they get to make their own hours (or choose not to work at all). Nevertheless, in high demand times, such as immediately after the Giants match last night, Sidecar had drivers to spare (according to my Sidecar app), while traditional taxies were nowhere to be seen thanks to the limits of the number of allowed taxies on the road.

Ride-sharing startups have boomed in San Francisco thanks to the unwavering support of their funders. On October 10th, Sidecar was rewarded $10million in Series A funding to expand their service nationally, with focus on Seattle. This comes just in time, as the companies face an unquenchable demand. In order to compensate, Lyft has had to impose a wait list, fees for ride cancelation, and large cash incentives for signing up to be a driver.

Most users aren’t complaining, and they often report a pleasant experience with ride-sharing, one that is better and cheaper than a traditional taxi. Ride-sharing drivers have to pass a set of quality guidelines, but the real accountability is set in the user/driver ratings. Each user and driver has a public rating, so if a driver has been consistently rated as a poor performer, he/she is out of the draft. The same can be said about passengers, as drivers are not likely to pick someone up who always vomits in the backseat. Rejoice! The free market works.

Regulators have stood their ground, issuing cease and desist letter to a number of these companies in major cities. Uber, a private car service, had to shut down its taxi hailing app in New York after regulators scared potential drivers away. On the other hand, Hailo, a UK startup with a similar service in Boston, has received the blessing of local regulators.

To be fair, regulators are citing important issues such as passenger safety and the fairness of driver payment. Although there a set of criteria to become a ride-share driver, they are not as vigorous as a traditional taxi driver. Moreover, ride-share drivers do not receive any company benefits, as they are technically working for themselves. In fact, that’s the primary reason ride-share companies have been able to avoid any fines, as the driver payment system is entirely donation-based, with passengers paying the driver an optional suggested donation (based on a community average). By this system, ride-sharing companies aren’t traditional taxi companies; they are transportation match makers.

It is likely that we will be hearing more from regulators, especially if/when any issues arise involving the safety of ride-share passengers. Until then, you might consider applying for Sidecar’s new Community Manager position in Seattle.

Steering clear of the issues about voting for third-party candidates, it is clear that one of the perpetual problems third-party candidates face is a lack of political exposure, in part due to the enormous power over American politics that the Democratic and Republican Parties exert. For example, the Commission on Presidential Debates is financed and run by the Republican and Democratic Parties – no wonder our lovely Green Party friends and other third-party candidates have been excluded election after election.  Major media sources like MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News all but ignore third-party candidates, helping reaffirm their exclusion from our political discourse or at least relegate their role to that of the “disruptive candidate” who will pull votes away from could-be winners.  The one third-party candidate who did break the cycle and actually win a significant amount of the vote was Ross Perot in the 1992 election, taking nearly 20% of the popular vote. Of course, Perot was able to run such a successful campaign at the time by spending more on campaign advertising than either Clinton or Bush thanks to his enormous personal wealth.

Yet its clear that spending millions in advertising revenue isn’t the only thing you need to attain a strong political following. In 1920, Eugene Debs, running as the Presidential candidate for the Social Democratic Part, received 913,693 write in votes, totaling 3.4% of the popular vote.  Yes, that’s right – nearly a million write in votes in an era before the internet, in large part thanks to incredible efforts at labor organizing around his campaign and widespread discontent with the established postwar political elite.  In 2000, Ralph Nader received 2.4% of the popular vote, again in an era where political organization and information-sharing was largely done offline but thanks again to significant organizing efforts on behalf of labor unions and universities. Today, we live in an era of unparalleled access to free information at our finger tips, with the vast majority of news and information shared over the web through forums, blogs, and online news sites. Major media companies have seen their stranglehold on access to information enjoyed during the era of television, radio and the newspaper slowly erode as the blogosphere has opened up smaller, independent sources of news to greater publicity.  Social networking itself has helped increase political awareness of various social and political issues, with one Pew Research Center study finding that 26% of US social network site users believe the platform is very important in recruiting people to get involved in political issues that matter to them.

Some candidates have taken full advantage of the online world.  Ron Paul’s recent run in the Republican Primary, for example, was far more successful than many originally thought it would be thanks to his incredibly robust online campaign.  Third-party and fringe candidates are utilizing the web more and more as a means of disrupting the powerful Democratic and Republican political machines and bypassing the inherent mainstream media bias. For example, two of the major third-party candidates, Jill Stein of the Green Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, had their own debate over a Google+ Hangout with voters submitting their own questions last Thursday (despite facing some minor technical difficulties).

As we become more and more dependent on the web for our information, more opportunities will arise for third-party candidates to spread their message and reach potential voters.  The question will be whether third-party candidates can outplay the established political parties on the web and make their message heard over the din of the mainstream political uproar.  Attracting donors and voters is far easier now than it was ten years ago and perhaps might give our founding fathers some hope (were they alive and tech-savvy) that our political system might become a bit less binary.

San Francisco tech companies voiced their support for Prop E last week through a video exalting the benefits of new public tech initiatives in the city, including a parking meter app and a Twitter SFPD crime reporting system. Nifty tech innovations aside, the video illustrates the cultural growing pains in San Francisco due to the tech boom.

In true techie form, the video puts a catchy tune over several ideas from San Francisco’s major tech leaders, including Square CEO Jack Dorsey and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. The ideas are hot, especially if the city starts replacing old/unused phone booths with free public wifi. The video was sponsored by San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation (sf.citi), which is an organization “created to leverage the power of the technology community around civic action”. Most of its members are San Francisco tech companies. At the end of the video, viewers are encouraged to “Vote Yes on Prop E”.

Ironically, the sf.citi video makes a rather crude reference to the other side of the story, perhaps unknowingly, at 1:19. A Bernal Heights resident speaking in Spanish complains about all the techies walking around like they own the place. Hosain Rahman, Founder of Jawbone, replies, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that.”

Over the last several months, both the New York Times and David Talbot of Salon.com have written stories on how the tech industry is changing the “soul” of San Francisco. “How much can one city take?” Talbot asks.

Hundreds of young, rich engineers and venture capitalists are moving into the city, pushing out the native culture through skyrocketing rent prices and disrupting cultures. If you aren’t in the tech industry, then you can hardly keep up with the costs of living in the city. Here’s a graph showing the percentage of monthly rent paid by a teacher and a software engineer over the past two years. The trend line shows that the teacher is finding it harder and harder to pay rent (not to mention all the other benefits the teacher has to pay for that are provided to the engineer).

Sources: Indeed.com and RentJungle.com

Proposition E is latest initiative by SF Mayor Ed Lee and the city’s start ups to create more favorable tax conditions for small businesses and innovation in the city. Mayor Lee has a long history of encouraging start up growth in the city, and he is seen as a major factor in the recent migration of tech companies from Silicon Valley to downtown San Francisco. It seems Prop E will be a benefit to the city’s economy for the long run.

To be fair, its hard not to side with the tech companies and the city government. Economic growth and technological improvement are tempting and beneficial, but it’s happening too fast for the city’s history to absorb. We are performing invasive surgery on a city’s culture.

A few weeks ago, returning to my apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, a young Mexican pointed me out and yelled, “Hey, you damn hipster, do you want to get punched in the face? Get out of my neighborhood!” All I could respond with was, “I live in this neighborhood, too. I’ve been here almost a year and a half!”

“You’re a joke,” he said, turning home.

First of all, the Internet is valuable and its proliferation should be encouraged. It has been highly documented that the Internet encourages free speech and the political and economic empowerment of the oppressed. It helps build credibility in government and helps prevent against human rights violations. Between 2000 to 2011, the number of humans with access to the Internet increased by approximately 480%, for a total of over 2 billion Internet users. Nevertheless, about 70% of humans do not have Internet access.

There have also been several claims to the status of the Internet as a human right. Tim Burners-Lee claimed the Internet access was the equivalent to water access. A number of European countries have already declared Internet access a human right. In 2011 the UN published a report establishing Internet access as a human right, and it was fortified through a resolution earlier this year. According to a world wide survey conducted by the BBC in 2010, over 70% of people believe the Internet should be protected at the human rights level.

Human rights claims for the Internet are wrong, not because the Internet isn’t important, but because of the definition of human rights. It is a question of human rights language, not the inherent value of the Internet.

There are plenty of ways of defining human rights, but here are two predominant thoughts.

First, human rights could be said to be things that are necessary for “humanness”. I doubt that most people would consider the Internet necessary for being human (after all, humans have existed without the Internet for thousands of years). However, the bigger problem with the “humanness” view of human rights is that there is an inherent subjective definition for achieving “humanness”, and how could we possible get everyone in the world to agree on what it means to be human? Moreover, what one might consider necessary to be human in the West might not be the same in the rest of the world, so parading around claiming human rights violations could be seen as parochial Western paternalism. Vint Cerf (aka father of the Internet) has made an argument that the Internet is not a human right from this definition of human rights.

Instead, let’s opt for a more philosophically liberal view of human rights. Human rights are things that are necessary for membership in a political community. Being part of a political community means that your interests are taken into account at the level of governing institutions. Thus, human rights are things that are necessary for your interests to be taken into account. Human rights are especially urgent because their violation means that someone is governing you without justifying their actions.

What is required for membership might be different in different societies, so we avoid the parochial problems of the first definition by accepting different views of membership from society to society. For example, in the UK democracy might be necessary for membership, but in Saudi Arabia it is not. Thus, we could not say that democracy is a human right because governments can taken their population’s interests into account even without democratic institutions.

Nevertheless, there are some basic things that are absolutely necessary for membership in every society. For example, some level of free speech is necessary because otherwise one could not ask for justification in cases where government ignores its population’s interests. Some level of free assembly is necessary because how could one be part of a political community if he/she is not permitted to be in close proximity to the community? These are things that are undoubtedly human rights in themselves because they are absolutely necessary for membership.

The Internet, however, is not necessary to be a member of a political community. As mentioned above, most of the world’s population is without Internet access, but you don’t see governments and international organizations putting blame on governing institutions if they are unable to provide access. Lack of access isn’t urgent because it isn’t necessary for membership.

Of course, Internet access is extremely valuable for membership, as it helps people realize higher levels of what is necessary for membership, such as free speech and assembly. Taking away Internet access once it is already there might be considered urgent because it threatens these more basic rights, such in the case of Egypt earlier this year, but if a government can’t provide the infrastructure for Internet access then it is not urgent. Because no minimum level of Internet access is required for membership, there does not exist a human right to the Internet.

Why is this distinction so important? Despite this argument, isn’t denying the status of the Internet as a human right counterproductive?

There is currently phenomenon in human rights discussion called “human rights inflation”, which threatens to weaken the importance of human right claims. In short, human rights inflation happens when people start claiming that everything is a human right without considering the conditions under which they can really make those claims (please stop voicing your ‘human right’ to cupcakes). Human rights are especially important things, so if we start saying everything is a human right we diminish the forcefulness of human rights language because we can no longer decipher what is fundamentally important. In the long run, this could cause roadblocks for justice and progress around the world.