"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive.
Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to
distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be
expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.
That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate
about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness
of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the
tension worse, not better."
Stewart Brand first said it in 1984 at the first Hackers’ Conference.
It was first printed in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review, and again in
1987 in his book, “The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.”