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Do we want the fruits of scientific progress to be made publicly available and shared by all of society (one must grant that even public universities have already begun privatizing their work, which is sad) or for it to end up privatized as part of patent portfolios to go to the highest bidder and to serve those with the most capital?

I already know what the answer is if we look at the current incentives in place, but what do we want?

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> Do we want the fruits of scientific progress to be made publicly available and shared by all of society [...] or for it to end up privatized as part of patent portfolios to go to the highest bidder and to serve those with the most capital?

Of course the former - but only as long as I can live from doing the research. As the German writer Bertolt Brecht put it in Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera): "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." ("Grub first, then ethics.").

In a capitalist society one can receive grub for work on ethics.

We need, as a society, to decide that it's worth investing in ethics, in basic research, etc, rather than trusting that market incentives will trickle out of these companies.

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