Depois de ter abordado a questão das redes Peer-to-Peer de partilha de ficheiros e a relação entre cultura, diversidade e os serviços de troca de músicas no formato MP3, o teórico dos média Siva Vaidhyanathan analisa agora a ciência e o conhecimento científico no terceiro artigo da sua série de ensaios sobre a cultura Peer-to-Peer no site OpenDemocracy. Siva denuncia a pretensão dos detentores de propriedade intelectual por um maior controlo a um nível planetário do conhecimento, da informação e da arte. Os responsáveis do site oferecem a possibilidade de críticos responderem a Vaidhyanathan. Aqui ficam alguns excertos do mais recente ensaio do nosso anarquista académico:
"Science is the most successful, open and distributed communicative system human beings have ever created and maintained. The cultural norms of science, and by extension academia in general, are anarchistic in the best sense of the word. Science and academia should be radically democratic. Although membership in these communities is effectively closed to a select few, the papers and books that come out of these communities are more often than not open to public perusal and commentary. And the traditions of blind peer-review do allow for motivated amateurs to participate occasionally in discourse and discovery, even if they can?t get past the guards protecting labs and libraries.(...)
Scientific knowledge often moves from a spring of open discourse into a stream of adoption and exploitation. The stream often moves from the public arena to the private sector. We have developed complex rules that guide this process. And each step embodies a tangle of values and ideologies. The rules and terms of discussion evolve from consensus-seeking processes within scientific communities. They then consider the demands of market forces to create and enforce scarcity and state demands for security.(...)
Proprietary control of databases of essential genetic information, for instance, raised the specter of redundant, imperfect, competitive private databases that would simultaneously lower the profits for companies that maintain them and raise transaction costs for companies that wish to use the information to develop drugs or therapies.(...)"