Cory Doctorow writes:
For 10 years I’ve been part of what the record and film industry invariably call the “information wants to be free” crowd. In all that time, I’ve never heard anyone – apart from an entertainment executive – use that timeworn cliche.
“Information wants to be free” (IWTBF hereafter) is half of Stewart Brand’s famous aphorism, first uttered at the Hackers Conference in Marin County, California (where else?), in 1984: “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.”
[…]
But it’s time for it to die.
It’s time for IWTBF to die because it’s become the easiest, laziest straw man for Hollywood’s authoritarian bullies to throw up as a justification for the monotonic increase of surveillance, control, and censorship in our networks and tools.
Read more in the Guardian.