Communication rights in Illuminatia

Communication rights are a set of highly-guarded civil liberties in Illuminatia and are considered to reside within a subset of inalienable human rights. Communication rights are divided into two categories: 1) the right to communicate, and 2) the right to be communicated to.

The right to communicate and be communicated to is firmly rooted in the right to free speech as first conceived within Earthly times of antiquity, though these rights were only inconsistently recognized through the late modern age of Earthly civilization and were not reliably delineated, practiced, and protected until the Lucidian age.

Communication rights are two-pronged in Illuminatian law and custom—a citizen enjoys the right to communicate or to speak, similar to the right to free speech—and additionally a citizen enjoys the right to be communicated to, which corresponds to a right to listen to the speech of others. These rights of course extend to all direct and mediated communications, be they verbal, visual, demonstrational, or through any printed or electronic media. The government may not enact law or policy that restricts one's right to speak; the government may also not enact law or policy that restricts one's right to receive communications. These freedoms stand so long as one's speech does not alienate another's right to do the same.

It is worth noting that while the common convention surrounding Illuminatian communication rights defines the rights to communicate or be communicated to, it does not establish any right to be listened to or to be spoken to. This is an important distinction, as there is no redress to regulation which may be perceived to not adequately address one's concerns regarding not reaching a willing audience with one's freely-delivered speech, or inversely one's concerns over a lack of communication instigated by others.

The widespread acceptance of and the official delineation of communication rights has resulted in institutions such as the public support of letters to the editor in newspapers as well as the existence of public access broadcasting.

Two prongs of communication rights

Right to communicate

• No laws restricting one's ability to speak, write, demonstrate, or disseminate communications;
• Protections for citizen-generated mass media including net neutrality for post and printed material, public access requirements for wireless broadcasting and telekinephotocasting.

Right to be communicated to

• No laws restricting or interfering with one's ability to receive direct or mediated communications;
• Protections against measures that may cut-off a citizen from reception of direct, printed, or electronic communications.

Institutions supporting communication rights

Newspapers that elect to benefit from the infrastructure of local periodicals distribution systems or funding from the Periodicals Circulation License are required to designate a reasonable amount of paper to freely-published letters to the editor, through which any citizen may submit a writing to be published in the newspaper. Newspapers are not required to publish any and every letter received, but may choose examples that represent the letters received or elect to publish excerpts.

Broadcasters that use the public airwaves are required to set aside a certain proportion of each broadcast day to the electronic version of letters to the editor—an obligation which on wireless stations may be answered via listener call-in programs, or which on telekinephotocast stations might be fulfilled by broadcasting public access programs. In lieu of producing public access programming, broadcast stations may elect to air network public access programming so long as the program provides for communications from the station's local viewing or listening area; stations might also instead elect to help fund a dedicated independent public access station. It is common for a majority of broadcast stations in a market to avoid broadcasting public access programs through collectively funding most or all of the operating costs of a local public access station.

In broadcasting, the right to be communicated to is upheld by protections to consumers from human-generated electromagnetic interference. The Bureau of Spectrum Management (BSM) is active in enforcing a clean electromagnetic spectrum to ensure citizens can always receive the broadcasts to which they are entitled. Public service stations and networks which receive funding from the Department of Public Service Media Investment (DPSMI) are held to certain standards as to the share of audience they reach. Publicly-funded stations and networks must build adequate infrastructure to reach either the local market of a given individual station or the entirety of the Illuminatian continent if operating as a national network with the privileges associated with such a network.