<div dir="ltr">Hello Parminder,<br><br>If the Rights based approach has to be the theme, so be it. But I don't like Parminder's draft as a starting point. I like Barlow's draft instead. <br><br>May be we can go over this, modify the tone to suit a diplomatic forum, but retaining the essence of this Declaration?<br>
<i><br></i><p><i><font face="AGaramond" size="4">A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace</font><font face="AGaramond"> </font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">by John Perry Barlow <<a href="mailto:barlow@eff.org">barlow@eff.org</a>> </font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">Governments of the Industrial World, you
weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home
of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us
alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we
gather.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">We have no elected government, nor are we
likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than
that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global
social space we are building to be naturally independent of the
tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us
nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to
fear.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">Governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours.
We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world.
Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can
build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot.
It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective
actions.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">You have not engaged in our great and
gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our
marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten
codes that already provide our society more order than could be
obtained by any of your impositions.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">You claim there are problems among us that
you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our
precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real
conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address
them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This
governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not
yours. Our world is different.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">Cyberspace consists of transactions,
relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the
web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and
nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">We are creating a world that all may enter
without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power,
military force, or station of birth.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">We are creating a world where anyone,
anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular,
without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">Your legal concepts of property, expression,
identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based
on matter, and there is no matter here.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike
you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from
ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance
will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your
jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would
generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to
build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the
solutions you are attempting to impose.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">In the United States, you have .. created
a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own
Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill,
Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew
in us.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">You are terrified of your own children, since
they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.
Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental
responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our
world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the
debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global
conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the
air upon which wings beat.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore,
Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of
liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These
may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in
a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">Your increasingly obsolete information
industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America
and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world.
These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no
more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may
create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The
global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to
accomplish.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">These increasingly hostile and colonial
measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of
freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of
distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune
to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over
our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one
can arrest our thoughts. </font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">We will create <b>a</b> civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.</font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">Davos, Switzerland </font></i></p>
<p><i><font face="AGaramond">February 8, 1996 </font></i></p><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:34 AM, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:isolatedn@gmail.com">isolatedn@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div dir="ltr">Hello Civil Society,<br><br>Have you noticed this?<div class="Ih2E3d"><br><br>
<i>Tunis Agenda says in 35, the <font face="Verdana" size="2"><font face="Verdana" size="2"><span style="font-weight: 400;">management
of the Internet ... should involve all stakeholders, but assigns the
importance of stakeholders to the convenience of governments:<br>
</span></font></font></i><ol type="a"><font face="Verdana" size="2"><font face="Verdana" size="2"><font face="Verdana" size="2"><font face="Verdana" size="2"><li>
<p align="left"><i><b>Policy authority ... is the sovereign right of States. They have rights </b>and
responsibilities for international Internet-related public policy
issues.
</i></p></li><li>
<p align="left"><i>The private sector ... should continue to have,
an important role ...
</i></p></li><li>
<p align="left"><i>Civil society has <b>also </b>played an important role on
Internet matters, especially at community level, and should continue to
play such a role.
</i></p></li><li>
<p align="left"><i>(role for intergovernmental organizations)</i></p></li><li><p align="left"><i>(role for international organizations)</i></p></li></font></font></font></font></ol></div>If someone has to guarantee / arbitrate / enforce rights and law enforcement happens to be the "sovereign right of States"<br>
<font color="#888888">
<br>Sivasubramanian Muthusamy.</font><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:30 AM, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:isolatedn@gmail.com" target="_blank">isolatedn@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div dir="ltr">Hello Norbert Klein and All,<br><br>This is a case in point. Within the existing legal structure, a "collective" has opted for legal action. Good. <br>
<br>But on the Internet, WITHOUT the legal framework, with no declared list of rights, flash this news in a few blog posts, post it in a few mailing lists, pick up a banner here and there and you will find whole communities from around the world plunging into affirmative action. May be even the Government of Japan would pay swifter attention, sooner than it takes the legal process to send a directive to set right the disparity<br>
<br>That is the beauty of the Internet Model. We don't have to declare rights to open a door for the proponents of greater control to volunteer to concede/guarantee/arbitrate/enforce such rights that the Civil Society declares. <br>
<br>Tell me who is going to concede/guarantee/arbitrate/enforce Rights before you begin discussing rights.<br><font color="#888888"><br>Sivasubramanian Muthusamy<br>India</font><div><div></div><div><br><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:02 PM, Norbert Klein <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nhklein@gmx.net" target="_blank">nhklein@gmx.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Let me also come in here. I am not sure if it is acceptable how I try to enter<br>
into this debate: I think it is not clear what the purpose of the draft is –<br>
at least it is not clear to me. Of course, in terms of intended procedures, I<br>
know. But...<br>
<br>
We seem to be caught in a philosophical debate – about individual or<br>
collective rights.<br>
<br>
A few days ago I read in a Japanese mailing list that people in the three very<br>
different communes of Ayabe, Shoubara, and Yukichou, in different regions of<br>
Japan, have organized and try to start legal action because of the poor<br>
Internet connection they have: while a lot of tasks of public administration<br>
are offred by the authorities online (often requiring broadband access to<br>
handle huge documents) – they are disadvantaged. Others are disadvanaged<br>
because educational programs offered to the public cannot be accessed<br>
reasonably (again: broaband access required) and as a result the people are<br>
educatinally deprived, compared to the majority of the citizens in the<br>
country etc.<br>
<br>
I do not have many more details – but I imagine that the people who feel<br>
excluded from what is offered to the society in general do not much argue if<br>
they claim individual or collective rights – they are just motivated to get<br>
over their deprivation, which many individuals felt, some individuals<br>
articulated, and finally a "collective" is trying to get their situation<br>
brought up to the general standard in their society, by legal action.<br>
<br>
The debate whether claims are always made in terms of "my individual right"<br>
even when they are made by a group of individuals who may or may not consider<br>
this as a group right, has no commonly shared answer – neither throughout<br>
history, nor in all possible localities.<br>
<br>
Do we have to get it philosophically clear, or do we want to point towards<br>
some directions which might be solved by some joint legal activities<br>
(different in diffeent situaios)? If we want to work towards both anyway –<br>
might it then be possible to avoid the unsolved philosophical basis?<br>
<br>
<br>
Norbert Klein<br>
Open Institute/Cambodia<br>
<font color="#888888">--<br>
If you want to know what is going on in Cambodia,<br>
please visit us regularly - you can find something new every day:<br>
<br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br></div></div><div>-- <br><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasubramanianmuthusamy" target="_blank">http://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasubramanianmuthusamy</a><br>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasubramanianmuthusamy" target="_blank">http://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasubramanianmuthusamy</a><br>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasubramanianmuthusamy">http://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasubramanianmuthusamy</a><br>
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