摘要: It is argued by some that governments and companies should never hesitate to disclose their information on scientific discoveries ...
It is argued by some that governments and companies should never hesitate to disclose their information on scientific discoveries to others for the sake of the general benefits of society as a whole. However, this opinion is specious.
True, some of the scientific information possessed by governments or companies can be and should be encouraged to be shared. Scientific Information such as global atmospheric change and climate variations and civilian information such as the important figures of international criminal organization must be accessible by all countries in the world in order to guarantee the well-being of people. Actually, exchanges of scientific information are not new. In the past decades, thanks to NASA which has revealed thousands of pictures taken by planet Probers such as Mariner and Curiosity to the public, people in other countries are able to know more about the universe and governments become increasingly motivated to explore the outer space. However, such bright pictures cannot cover the fact that not any information can be shared and more often than not, information that a government or a company has must be confidential
Firstly, some scientific information must be kept as secret because the leakage of such information may put a country at stake. A country may have a lot of classified information about its military, economy and science. If such information is acquired by hostile countries or terrorists, the security of the country would definitely be compromised. For example, countries which US considers aggressive such as Iran and North Korea are trying their best developing nuclear weapons while US is sparing no efforts in preventing any possible technical information from being obtained by those two countries. Such an example shows that as far as state security is concerned, not all the information should be accessible to others.
As for the companies, information with regard to their latest products must be classified; otherwise, the financial interests of the companies would suffer from possible loss. Suppose a company invests a lot of money into developing a new product but the information of the product is acquired by its competitors who appropriate the new idea without any cost. If things like this happened, the result would be catastrophic. Actually, in modern business world, every company pays more than enough attention to guard against any infringement of their copyrights. Recently, US-based company Apple Inc. and Korean Electronic device manufacturer Samsung are suing each other and accusing each other of stealing patents and ideas. Examples like this show that no company is willing to share information without compensation , because information means financial benefits which are the lifelines of companies.
In a nutshell, although sometimes information owned by governments and companies should be available to the general public, in most cases such information should be handled scrupulously because any leakage may lead to disasters.
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