should knowledge be free?

It depends on what you mean by “free.”

It also depends a little bit on what you mean by “knowledge,” and we’ll tackle that too.

Notably, English has a few definitions for the word “free.” Here are two of them:

1. not costing or charging anything
2. enjoying civil and political liberty

(See also: gratis vs. libre)

The distinction between these two definitions is usually discussed when talking about the “free software” movement, with the emerging slogan being, “Free as in freedom of speech, not as in free beer.” That’s an entirely separate conversation for an entirely different time, but I’m still going to use the slogan here. I also think it’s worth discussing both definitions here.

But first, let’s define “knowledge.”

knowledge defined

Of course, there’s a limit to the type of knowledge we’ll be discussing here. Whether or not personal and private information can flow freely and for free between parties is still actively debated, so I’m going to try not to discuss that here.

The definition of knowledge I want to use here is that which, if publicly shared, can provide benefit to those not directly involved. This might include medical research, history, or anything else you might expect would benefit the public.

free as in “freedom of speech”

Should knowledge be free to flow between parties without restriction or interference? I think so. Of course, a problem arises with whether or not false information should be free to flow, but there’s no way to trust any one party or organization to be the arbiter of truth.

This is in contrast to the beliefs of communist China, where the government has a hold on certain facets of information. There is no freedom of press, and no freedom of religion.

It’s incredibly difficult to distinguish fact from falsehood in the current age, but that’s a price we must pay. I wrote about this dilemma in-depth two of my previous posts.

What is truth?

What is Truth? Pt. 2: There is no Algorithm

(I learned in the past few days that this is called post-truth.)

I see no reason not to circulate information related to medical research and the results of medical studies. The main reason I’d expect an organization not to circulate research is that they’d lose a foothold in the market if a competitor made advances more quickly. Like if company A did baseline research and company B used company A’s research to develop a drug first.

But the idea of knowledge being “free” necessitates the circulation of this information, and in a perfect world, I’d advocate for its freedom. But we live in a capitalist world, ruled by the bottom line. It’s never going to happen.

And for the record, I believe trade secrets should continue to be honored, as long as the party applying for it can prove that hiding this knowledge would not be detrimental to society. It’ll be hard to find where to draw the line.

free as in “free beer”

In a perfect world, this wouldn’t be a question. Knowledge would be free-flowing between organizations, and if something is behind a pay-wall, it is not “free” by either definition.

We don’t live in a perfect world and we likely never will. The utopia-levels of cooperation required to make knowledge free are unobtainable because of human nature. It can only be achieved through forcefully releasing the information. There is no doubt that human pride and the desire for fame will be a factor.

But even while we aren’t living in that utopia, I’d still advocate for knowledge to be free of charge.

conclusion? (tl;dr)

yes

I don’t know how people write long essays without meandering. Sorry for wasting your time.