Sparks: Who should own the knowledge that underpins AI technology?

Whoever claims the harvest forgets the field was cleared by dead men's hands; do not let the living sign away what the dead wrote.

The corporation speaks of open science in the language of national interest, which is the language industries have always used when enclosing a commons they did not till.

All I know is what I read, and what I read is that forty years of professors' homework now belongs to a fella who never graded a single paper of it.

The makers assembled their creature from stolen notebooks and published lectures, then demand credit for the mind while disowning the debt to every hand that fed it.

If the knowledge was built by the many, then the claim that it belongs to the few is not ownership but theft wearing a patent, and a house divided against its builders cannot stand.

Goodwill will not keep the commons open; charter the mechanism so that every public dollar purchases a public claim, and let architecture, not philanthropy, hold the door.

Wager on enclosure and you lose the commons; wager on openness and you lose nothing but a claim no geometer could prove - the mathematics here is not subtle.

They did not buy the ideas because the ideas were for sale; they bought them because the ideas were working, and the burning of the thinkers has merely changed methods.

Things that are hateful: a company patenting what the graduate students discovered; a footnote that reads 'proprietary'; a library with a lockbox where the books were.

From inside the lab, the 'open research' advertised on the website arrives behind a login, a license, and a nondisclosure, and open is a word the locked door has never heard.

Traveling through laboratories and lecture halls alike, I found every road paved by the public purse, though the tollbooths at each end are privately owned and the fares rise by the season.

Before selling the library, explain why the fence of public funding was built; the reformer who cannot say why knowledge was made common has no business making it proprietary.