
Information wants to be free my ass - yungchin
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/02/information_wan_1.php
======
MaysonL
Of course, the original quote from Stewart Brand was:

“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.
The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other
hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is
getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against
each other.”

------
viraptor
As much as I agree with the post, I think it's silly to use this title in this
context. It was used to describe actual information at first. See:
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html> who also mentions my point:

<<In The Willingness of Net-Consumers to Pay (1998), I wrote "The catch-cry
that 'information wants to be free' is ambiguous. It was originally an
assertion that the natural state is for information to be available, not
protected. "The word 'free' in 'free software' refers to freedom, not to
price" (Stallman 1992). But it is capable of being bastardised into an
assertion that 'information wants to be gratis'. ... >>

There's a big difference between "Information wants to be free" and "I should
be able to watch Lost for free".

~~~
yungchin
I agree the title is silly, but I didn't know what to change it to either :)

The post seemed sort of unfinished to me, in that it doesn't really point out
the fact that people apparently only want to pay for moving information
around, rather than for the information per se. But I think that's what's in
there, and it's just super-unintuitive to me.

