The Digital Justice Foundation (“DJF”) advocates for individual rights in digital spaces and aims to ensure that traditional notions of justice and civil liberties continue to thrive in the digital age. In carrying out this mission, the DJF places a particular focus on being a voice for underrepresented individuals and interests.
The DJF’s work in copyright law serves as an important cornerstone of this mission. Indeed, the DJF sees individual copyright protections as an integral part of a stable digital economy and well-functioning political system, advancing important humanistic values such as privacy, consent, and digital dignity.
While certain organizations feel that digital technologies have undermined the importance of copyright’s protections, the DJF firmly believes that these technologies have made copyright more important than ever. For example, an often-overlooked consequence of the internet is that, for the first time in history, most citizens are now regular creators and publishers of content. The emergence of a content-creating public gives copyright’s protections a newfound importance to a vastly wider class of citizens than in previous times.
Public debates on copyright should reflect this development. Yet the public’s interest in copyright often goes unrepresented in the inter-industry disputes that shape the development of copyright law. To correct this absence, the Digital Justice Foundation is a committed advocate before courts and policymakers for the rights of individual creators and for the often-underappreciated public interest in their rights.
Beyond the copyright context, the DJF promotes and protects civil liberties, privacy rights and employee rights as they are affected by new technologies. For these reasons, the DJF and its attorneys have been at the forefront of emergent legal issues surrounding algorithmic discrimination and governmental adoption of new technologies to administer traditional government functions. The DJF is also exploring novel ways to harness the power of technology to expand access to law.
In an age of rapid technological development, entrenched interests often drown out individual voices and overshadow the development of individual rights. The DJF is committed to ensuring that technology and traditional rights develop hand-in-hand.
