This article addresses the societal tension between sharing and protecting knowledge, and discusses how to protect the interests of individuals or groups while allowing knowledge to benefit society as a whole. It uses a variety of examples to illustrate the impact of knowledge sharing on social development and emphasizes the need to find trade-offs that balance the interests of society and individuals.
“Knowledge should be free.” This is the slogan of the international hacker organization Anonymous. Under this slogan, they officially support WikiLeaks, a site dedicated to exposing state secrets. Anonymous’ philosophy goes beyond just hacking, and includes a sense of mission to ensure that information is accessible to all. In October 2010, after WikiLeaks released thousands of diplomatic documents, financial companies including MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal blocked all donations to the organization. This was interpreted as an attempt to suppress freedom of information, and Anonymous retaliated by launching DDOS attacks on the servers of PayPal and Visa, which crashed their payment systems. Of course, their actions are crimes that harm others, but even their slogan, “Knowledge should be free,” cannot be denied.
Humans have long been sharing and accumulating knowledge with each other. Writers have taught readers, teachers have taught students, and seniors have taught juniors what they have learned, what they have experienced, and what they have mastered. This has been happening over and over again since the dawn of history, and knowledge has been accumulating constantly. As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun, and there is nothing in the world that hasn’t been influenced by previous generations. Without the sharing of knowledge, there would be no accumulation of knowledge, and human civilization would never have progressed.
In recent years, the sharing and preservation of knowledge has become more and more discussed along with the importance of information. In the past, the accumulation of knowledge was dominated by certain groups, but in the modern world, the democratization of knowledge is rapidly progressing with the development of technology. However, this process is also complicating the conflict over free access to information and knowledge. In recent years, social conflicts over the disclosure of information, such as WikiLeaks, have become increasingly intense, which is closely related to the relationship between knowledge sharing and accumulation. This is because the recent development of information and communication technology has changed the transmission of information from vertical to horizontal. In the past, the creation of knowledge was mostly done in the upper echelons of society. This is because the upper class had easy access to the knowledge of previous generations. They had access to books and education, which were not readily available to the lower classes, so they had the ability to share the knowledge of previous generations and create new knowledge. Today, however, the internet has made knowledge accessible to everyone, giving everyone the ability to create information. In the past, power, wealth, and knowledge were concentrated, and only knowledge was distributed away from them, creating an imbalance, which is why conflicts over knowledge have intensified like today.
These conflicts are not just on the internet. Issues related to the sharing of knowledge continue to arise in other fields, such as education, healthcare, and technology. In medicine, for example, knowledge sharing can lead to important advances, such as the development of new drugs. At the same time, however, pharmaceutical companies are often reluctant to open up their knowledge, claiming exclusive rights to the research and development they have invested in. This represents another form of conflict between societal interests and individual or group interests. While freely shared knowledge can improve the health of humanity as a whole, it can also come at the expense of individual companies’ economic interests.
However, there is nothing wrong with the spread of knowledge, as it accumulates more rapidly the more widely it is shared. When knowledge is widely shared, it means that many people are thinking about current issues related to that knowledge. This increases the likelihood that many people will be able to provide direction and solve the problem. The fact that knowledge is now so readily available to the general public, as opposed to the upper class, is one of the reasons why the rate of knowledge accumulation has accelerated so dramatically.
An example of how sharing knowledge leads to accumulation can be seen in today’s IT industry. There are currently three main competing browsers for browsing the internet. They are Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. Explorer is a browser made by Microsoft that uses a technology called ActiveX to distribute programs and run them through the browser. Microsoft’s openness of this technology has enabled the development of programs using ActiveX and has led to the development of many web technologies, such as the security systems we use for internet banking. Firefox was created by the Mozilla Foundation, and by opening up the browser source completely, users were able to modify and develop the browser in ways that ActiveX could not. This led to the creation of a number of add-ons, such as the ability to manipulate the browser with mouse movements and make the browser close unnecessary pop-up windows on its own. Google’s subsequent version, Chrome, emulated Firefox’s success by fully disclosing the browser’s source code and offering a rather large reward for anyone who could hack the browser and find security issues, with marketing that encouraged users to accumulate knowledge; a teenager who managed to do so was rewarded with $60,000. ActiveX in Explorer, open source in Firefox, and Google’s bounty policy are examples of knowledge sharing that has led to the accumulation of knowledge by non-experts by releasing knowledge that was not easily created by experts in the industry. All of this knowledge has benefited society as a whole.
However, there are many cases where it is in the interest of some groups, but not society as a whole, to withhold knowledge. Let’s continue with our browser example. If Explorer hadn’t disclosed its ActiveX technology, it wouldn’t be as easily hacked as it is now. If Firefox hadn’t released the source and used their knowledge to create and sell the browser, a browser like Google’s Chrome would not have been possible, and they would have gotten a bigger share and profit. Google would have punished the people who hacked Chrome and saved money on fixing the security issues by hiding them. But while this would have secured their own interests, it would not have benefited society in terms of the evolution of the web experience.
In the end, it comes down to a choice between sharing knowledge for the benefit of society as a whole, or keeping it secret for the benefit of a select group. However, these issues are not limited to the disclosure of knowledge. For example, if you decide on a bus route, you have to decide how far apart the bus stops should be: if they are too close together, the bus will run slower, and if they are too far apart, it will be difficult for people to access the bus. In this case, faster buses benefit all bus riders, but easier access to bus stops in some areas benefits only those in those areas. This is also a conflict between social and individual interests.
We recognize that there is a trade-off in the case of these stops. There are certainly stops where moderate speeds can be achieved and not have a significant impact on local residents. And there is rationale and logic at the center of these trade-offs. When selecting the location of a bus stop, factors such as population characteristics, land characteristics, and road characteristics of the area are taken into account and scored, and then the stop is installed based on these scores. The same should be true for knowledge disclosure. There will be trade-offs between the interests of the society as a whole and the interests of individuals, and there needs to be a clear rationale and logic for making these decisions.
There are many conflicts around knowledge sharing today. Wikileaks and governments, software companies and hackers, numerous intellectual property disputes and plagiarism claims, and so on. But there is no clear standard for resolving these conflicts. WikiLeaks just wants to expose, governments just want to cover up. Hackers just want to dig into program sources, and software companies want to punish them – there’s no consensus or rationale in between. But there must be a middle ground between these conflicts, just as there must be a middle ground between building a bus stop and giving people the right to board the bus while still allowing the bus to run fast. There must be a compromise that allows people to seek their right to know while at the same time ensuring the proper interests of government entities. There will be a way for hackers to gain the knowledge to reconfigure their programs and move forward in a better way, while at the same time ensuring that the interests of the software companies themselves are protected. And just as bus stops are built with a clear rationale and scored based on a combination of factors, there are ways to set standards that take into account the impact of disclosing knowledge.
In a world where knowledge is a commodity, it is clear that sharing knowledge freely is not an easy task. Personal gain is at the root of all human activity, and it is this gain that motivates people and keeps them committed to their work. That’s what intellectual property rights are all about, after all. However, we can’t completely ignore the interests of society as a whole in favor of personal gain. Human history has been built on the interests of society, and the interests of society have in turn been built on the interests of individuals. We can’t ignore either the individual interest or the societal interest. Therefore, we must always make a compromise between the two and move forward through consensus.
