April 19, 2010 Volume 88, Number 16 p. 3
Rudy Baum, Editor-in-chief
I have stated in this space before that I think the notion that “information wants to be free” is one of the most pernicious ideas perpetrated in the age of the Internet (C&EN, Nov. 5, 2007, page 3).
First of all, the phrase, attributed to author Stewart Brand, is completely out of context. What Brand said in 1984 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.”
More important, I think, is the silliness of attributing motive to something—information—that is inanimate and, absent humans to process it, perhaps nonexistent.
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Source: http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/88/i16/html/8816editor.html
