Information Wants to be Free — Or Does It?

Posted by on Apr 3, 2010 in Blog, Social Public Relations | 0 comments

Novelist Mark Helprin stepped in a hornet’s nest when he asserted that intellectual property rights should be assigned to an author or artist for as long as Congress sees fit. Not surprisingly, those most incensed were the Internet Freedom crowd — “Digital Barbarians” to Helprin.

A popular slogan of the Digerati is that “information wants to be free,” a widely — perhaps “wildly” is the better word — misinterpreted phrase. When Stewart Brand coined it, tellingly at the first Hacker’s Conference in 1984, his actual words were:

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.

Brand meant the mediums are getting cheaper, reducing the cost of distribution. Nothing he said implies that information should be free or authors denied ownership or payment. Yet there is no question that many experts willingly provide invaluable information at no charge. Wikipedia is just one example. Who among us doesn’t use these free resources multiple times per day — or, alternately, turn away from others because they demand a usage or subscription fee?  “You get what you pay for” was once the rule of thumb. No longer. What you get for nothing might be just as good. Whether it’s great is another question.

An artist once burned his most famous works to protest federal taxes on his collection. Let us hope that “free” doesn’t become a worse tax on genius — in art, business or technology.

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