A.N. Other, B.N. Other (eds.), Title of Book, 00–00. © 2005 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. SORAJ HONGLADAROM CAN KNOWLEDGE BE OWNED AND COMMODIFIED? INTRODUCTION My intention in this paper is to present an anatomy of the question whether knowledge can be owned and commodified. The issue of course is a central one in the debate on copyrights and intellectual property rights. The question has assumed a lot of importance in recent years due to the attempts by business enterprises and international organizations to impose what is called “intellectual property rights” in order, so the argument goes, to protect the products of those who invented them and should be in a position to profit from them. It is, however, rather well known that the term “intellectual property” is an umbrella term comprising a variety of different things (Stallman, 2006). This points to the fact that the term may have been invented as a convenience to serve some purpose. This line of argument presupposes that knowledge (as well as its close corollaries, i.e., technical expertise and invention) can be owned as well as bought and sold. This runs counter to most conceptions of knowledge in many non-western cultures. Based on my earlier work on cross-cultural epistemologies and the roles of local knowledge traditions (Hongladarom, 2001; 2002a), I would like to address this tension in how knowledge is perceived and understood, and in the end I hope to be able to provide an answer to the title question. When examined closely, the idea that knowledge can be owned and commodified sounds rather odd. For one thing knowledge, at least as understood in philosophical circles, is an attitude that the subject has toward her object. That is to say, knowledge is a species of belief, which, when true and justified, becomes knowledge. Much of the effort in epistemology has been directed toward elucidating the nature of justification—what it is that enables a true belief to become a piece of knowledge in such a way that the possessor of the true belief comes to its possession in virtue of her having good and adequate reason or evidence for it, and that the belief does not happen to be true and comes to her possession without her realizing how it comes about. 1 Knowledge as traditionally conceived, then, is a subjective state. One comes to know that such and such is the case. There is a relation between the knower and the object of her knowing—that such and such is the case. The object here, strictly speaking, is not an object at all, but a kind of abstract entity which is also a subject of much philosophical debate and discussion. In any case, the abstract object of knowing could be roughly described, metaphorically speaking, as “residing” within the mind of the knower. The problem for our case here is, then, how such an abstract, putatively mental entity—the “that such and such is the case”—has seemed to become a commodity to be protected with the regime of “intellectual property rights” in today’s interrelated legal and commercial world systems.