Information wants to be free

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Aliases: information is meant to be free

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

Brand's conference remarks are transcribed in the Whole Earth Review (May 1985, p. 49) and a later form appears in 'The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT', Viking Penguin, 1987 (ISBN 0-14-009701-5), p.202:

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ... That tension will not go away.[1]

The various forms of the original statement are ambiguous; the slogan can be used to argue the benefits of either propertised information, or liberated/free/open information, or both.

In 1990, Richard Stallman put a normative spin on Brand's slogan:

I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By 'free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses.[2]

Dorothy E. Denning explains:

By 'generally useful' he does not include confidential information about individuals or credit card information, for example.[2]

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