Information Wants To Be Free. For a Price.

“Ah yes, Free. Nobody who’s been awake online for more than five minutes can have missed Stewart Brand’s famous aphorism, “information wants to be free”. What he said next is just as important, for all it gets forgotten: “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 (technological) devices makes the tension worse, not better”

— Rupert Goodwin’s commentary on ZDNet.uk. Read more here

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.