Everyone is born with an equal right to education. I agree with that without hesitation.
The difficulty begins immediately after that sentence. Not everyone can afford the cost of education. If poverty prevents someone from buying books, audio courses, videos, journals, or other learning materials, has that person effectively been stripped of a right they were born with? And if so, does that justify pirating those materials? Does it also justify distributing pirated books, films, lectures, and papers to others in the same situation?
This is where I become uncertain. Which matters more: property rights, or the equal right of every person to be educated?
If the right to education should prevail, then we still need to define what kind of knowledge is essential to that right. Some knowledge may be necessary for basic education; some clearly is not. If society can draw that boundary, the state could pay for the necessary knowledge, buy out the relevant rights, and turn it into a public good available to everyone for free. From this angle, nine-year compulsory education may be the current boundary the state has drawn around what it considers necessary.
But many people who invoke “fair access to education” do not stop there. They share everything they can find, without distinction: current journals and magazines, newly published academic papers, serialized literary works, newly released films and television productions, and more. This is not merely the defense of basic education. It is often the unrestricted redistribution of any content that can be copied.
Worse still, some websites present themselves as knowledge-sharing communities while operating as businesses: running advertisements, charging for downloads, selling memberships. When piracy is packaged as public service but used for profit, it is no longer a noble defense of education. It is straightforward theft.
“Books are not written to be hidden behind high walls, but to spread through the world, to inspire and enlighten people.” Knowledge should not be the privilege of a small minority. It should flow freely and smoothly to everyone who needs it. The aim is to use blockchain technology to build a global community for high-quality knowledge sharing, so that everyone can freely access knowledge and read for free.
Statements like this sound generous and even moving. But they also avoid the hardest question: if knowledge must be free because education should be fair, should patents also lose protection?
Patent protection may restrict access, and it is often criticized for slowing innovation or worsening inequality. The most obvious example is pharmaceutical research. Every new drug may bring hope to people suffering from disease, sometimes people standing at the edge of death. Yet patent-protected prices can put that hope far beyond the reach of most patients. Should price protection for original drugs be abolished?
The same question applies beyond medicine. Hybrid crop varieties, methods for synthesizing new materials, new processes for electronic devices, underlying software architectures—these are all tied to patent protection. If free access to knowledge overrides intellectual property, should these protections disappear as well?
My own view is that intellectual property and patents deserve protection. At first glance, this seems to conflict with my belief that everyone is born with an equal right to education. But the contradiction is not really between education and property. The real issue is where to draw the line between free access and protected rights, and whether the free portion should be paid for by the state.
After all, when the state pays, everyone pays collectively. The result can still be that each individual uses the resource for free.
Even though I support protecting intellectual property, I often run into the same dilemma as those who argue for free sharing. For example, consider Benjamin M. Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. It is more than 500 pages, but the listed price is far beyond what I am willing to accept.
What should one do in that situation? Give up reading, or choose a pirated copy?
Price is often used as the excuse for piracy, but price is always relative. There is no absolute line between expensive and cheap. If I choose a free pirated e-book simply because I dislike the price, then the difference between me and someone who refuses to pay for any knowledge at all is only a matter of degree.
This leads to another part of the problem: the pricing of knowledge. Whether we say the price belongs to “knowledge” itself or to its external form—books, videos, audio resources, databases—is not the important point. Pricing affects people in the middle: those who are willing to pay for reasonably priced knowledge, but who may turn to piracy when the price feels unacceptable.
A third issue is the duration of protection. Under current domestic copyright rules, copyright protection lasts until 50 years after the author’s death. I support this kind of system. It allows works of civilization to be passed on to the public while also allowing wealth to be passed on to the next generation.
But many books still sold today were written one or two hundred years ago, and some were written one or two thousand years ago. Their prices can still be high enough to discourage ordinary readers. Printed books have production costs, of course. But why are electronic versions still not legally shareable?
The copyright term of a work may have expired, but the public may not hold publishing rights. Without those rights, the knowledge still cannot be openly distributed. Publishers may have publishing rights, but will they voluntarily create free electronic editions for the public? In practice, publishing rights can become an extension of copyright protection.
So another question follows: for works whose copyright protection has expired, is it just to scan them or use OCR to make electronic versions and share them publicly?
I am asking whether it is just, not whether it is legal.
Everyone is born with an equal right to education, yet poverty deprives many people of that right. To protect this natural and equal right for ourselves and for others, how should we treat intellectual property? This is not a small question.
Intellectual property is only one part of property rights. The attitude we take toward it will inevitably affect how we think about other forms of property as well. That is precisely the issue many people who use fair education as a cover for piracy prefer not to face.