Re: What Stewart Brand Said

["Stephen D. Franklin" <franklin@uci.edu>]

See also the fine (classic?) reference on this saying:
  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IWtbF.html

-- sdf
Stephen D. Franklin  --  franklin@uci.edu  --  949/824-5154
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/indiv/franklin/

> Dear liblicense-l Readers:  I'm taking a listowner's prerogative tonight
> and sending a second message, a kind of moral paradox for our times,
> because receiving this from another e-mail list via a colleague made me
> think of the numerous exchanges on this list and many others, regarding
> the price of information.
> 
> "Information wants to be free."
> 
> That was Stewart Brand's creation, originally uttered in 1984, at the
> first Hackers' Conference, and printed in a report in the May 1985 "Whole
> Earth Review." It later turned up in his book, "The Media Lab:  Inventing
> the Future at MIT," published in 1987:
> 
> "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive.
> Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute,
> copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because
> it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go
> away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright,
> 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution,
> because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
> 
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