Data as common good.

Abstract

Data are part of language, intelligence, description, knowledge production, politics, economics, medicine: they are the essential quantitative component of any message. The recent transformation of reality into data, however, has made data an economic commodity. But does the raw material of which knowledge is made - data - belong to the universe of the unalienable rights of the individual and of populations or to the global normativity of economy-goods? The transformation of data into proprietary goods has introduced into the rules of research the artificiality and complication of a contractual logic that transforms the qualitative-contextual component of projects into an unwelcome or disturbing guest and turns attention to formal details into a purely administrative exercise. The only possible solution is not to accept the blackmail of obeying the rigidity of rules that prevent a serious and responsible relationship with the problems of patients and real populations.