Academic debates tend focus on attempts to codify and promote communication rights at the global level. This article provides a model to analyse communication rights at a national level by operationalising four rights: access, availability, dialogical rights, and privacy. It highlights specific cases of digitalisation in Finland, a country with an impressive record as a promoter of internet access and digitalised public services. The article shows how national policy decisions may support economic goals rather than communication rights, and how measures to realise rights by digital means may not always translate into desired outcomes, such as inclusive participation in decision-making.
Protection of privacy is currently a debated topic with regard to collecting and processing of location data via smartphones. This article seeks to discover whether meaningful protection of privacy is fostered by default location settings and the practice of seeking users' permission by requiring approval of general terms and conditions, or if these instead cause users to unknowingly share location data. The article also asks whether such practices comply with human rights law and European Union (EU) data protection law. Moreover, the article discusses whether it is feasible to adopt transparent, explicit and specific steps to secure user privacy at all levels of smartphone usage, and argues that users should enjoy some control over personal data associated with smartphone usage, including location, and that this control should be executed under a legal arrangement which also secures users' privacy and enables app developers' or operating system providers' lawful purposes with regard to processing location data.
The objective of this paper is to explore the need for and possible benefits of social norms-based intellectual property systems in the context of the renaissance of decentralized production. Innovative engineering in addition to powerful information and communications technology enables a renaissance of decentralized production. A central form of such is co-engaging production. This renaissance can already be observed in small-scale 3D printing, microbreweries, small-scale food production in rooftop greenhouses, and small-scale electricity generation with solar panels installed by users of electricity. Individuals engaging in decentralized production typically have limited resources, which may hinder them from applying registration for industrial property rights. Therefore, social norms-based intellectual property can, in some cases, be more cost efficient in the case of decentralized production. In the case of cross-border groups, social norms-based intellectual property can evolve regardless of territorially restricted national legal-based intellectual property rights. The advantages of social norms may override their disadvantages when no great economic interests are involved and the production and the need of protection are short-term by nature. The decentralized characteristic of social norms-based intellectual property brings in new people as creators of creations for which intellectual property protections exist. This can enhance creativity by broadening the cognitive and cultural diversity of the creations. Social norms-based and legal norms-based intellectual property systems are not mutually exclusive and can exist side-by-side.
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