>How is “knowledge” “owned”? Is he talking about parents?

he's talking about private organizations doing research and then keeping the information to themselves because its their intellectual property (since they did the work.)

its a bit of a conundrum because private industry has a great deal of capital to expend on research but their motivation is profit: if they can't own their discoveries then they won't invest. but that means if they find a cure for a disease they can keep it to themselves which defeats the purpose of motivating their research.