Digital Commons Network^™

Toward An International Law Of The Internet, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

This Article presents the first in depth analysis of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as it applies to new technologies and uses this analysis to develop the foundation for an “international law of the Internet.” Although Article 19 does not guarantee a right to the “Internet” per se, it explicitly protects the technologies of connection and access to information, and it limits states’ ability to burden content originating abroad. The principles derived from Article 19 provide an important normative reorientation on individual rights for both domestic and international Internet governance debates.

Article 19’s guarantee …

Networked Activism, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

The same technologies that groups of ordinary citizens are using to write operating systems and encyclopedias are fostering a quiet revolution in another area – human rights advocacy. On websites such as Avaaz.org and Wikipedia, ordinary citizens are reporting on human rights violations and organizing email writing campaigns, activities formerly the prerogative of professionals. The involvement of amateurs has been heralded as revolutionizing a variety of industries, from journalism to photography. This article asks whether it has the potential to make human rights organizations irrelevant.

In contrast to much of the recent literature, this article provides a decidedly more skeptical …

Protecting Rights Online, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

Although the human rights and access to knowledge (A2K) movements share many of the same goals, their legal and regulatory agendas have little in common. While state censorship online is a central concern for human rights advocates, this issue has been largely ignored by the A2K movement. Likewise, human rights advocates have failed to examine the cumulative effect of expanding copyright protections on education and culture. These disparate agendas reflect fundamentally different views about what states should regulate and the role of international institutions. Overcoming this divide is critical to ensuring the movements can draw on their respective strengths to …