Let’s revisit the Stewart Brand quote that “information wants to be free”. The full quote reads: “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.” The phrase “information wants to be free” is little more than throat clearing … Continue reading Chris Ruen