The problem of scientific "communism"

I was reading the other day and I stumbled across the work of sociologist, Robert Merton. A concept of Merton’s is the idea of Scientific “Communism”. Communism is an unfortunate word for the idea Merton describes—the word typically evokes hierarchical authoritarian governments, not what Merton means.

By Scientific “Communism” Merton is referring to the common ownership of scientific discoveries and by extension the paradox that many of our private commercial enterprises are based on the willingness of scientists to freely give-up their intellectual property.

Indeed, would market research exist as we know it if people like Gosset and Fisher hadn’t freely given the world things like the t-test and the null hypothesis? Would we have online research if Linux didn’t exist? What would we do without Wikipedia? As such, if our work is based upon information, concepts and ideas freely given away by others, is it really ethically tenable for us to continue basing our business models around the idea of information ownership?

Some people would say no. For example the copyleft (opposed to copyright) licences (like the GNU and Creative Commons Share-Alike) say that any work deriving from work with such a licence must be published under the same licence. As such any work derived from work which is given away freely is also given away freely.

Whilst it’s a debatable point, let’s say that we believe it isn’t right for market research to charge for the ownership of information we produce because it derives from information given away freely—what do we sell? I think the answer lies somewhere in moving away from being a profession which charges people for the ownership of information, and moving towards being a profession who are paid for what we are able to do with information. Maybe I’m splitting hairs to simply solve a philosophical puzzle, or maybe such a shift in the way we perceive what we do will have implications which I’m yet to imagine.