What does information want?
[DRAFT]

The quotation "Information wants to be free" seems to have originated with Stewart Brand in 1984 when he spoke at the first Hackers Conference.  But he also said, at the same time, "information wants to be expensive".  Those are the two extremes in the war currently being waged between the media conglomerates ("we'll lock it all up") and the cyberpunks ("we'll steal it all").  Brand later elaborated on the tension created by these opposing desires of information, to be free and to be expensive: 

"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." 

Part of the confusion in this great debate about whether information should be free is that the word free, with reference to information, can equally mean "without cost" (gratis) or "able to move at will" (libre).  Brand was using the word free to mean gratis.  Many others who use the phrase mean "information wants to move freely" or "information wants to be free to roam".  Thomas Jefferson was an early advocate of this concept.  He said " ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition,"  

John Perry Barlow has made "Information wants to be free" into a rallying cry for his anti-copyright position. Richard Stallman, who is  against software copyright specifically says he doesn't refer to price when he says information should be "free" 

There are strong arguments on both sides of this debate.  Many innovators are trying to find a middle ground, rather than giving in to one extreme or the other.  Larry Lessig has been a major force in establishing a middle ground called Creative Commons.  He says, "For the Information Society is a place where culture is both free and owned. It is a place where property coexists with the commons of the public domain. Like a city where parks coexists with private houses, the tradition of balance that has marked the protection of copyright seeks a world where copyright coexists with the public domain." 

Ted Nelson also proposes a middle ground where public domain documents can be seamlessly composited with copyrighted material.  He calls this "TransLiterature" and incorporates in it a license called TransCopyright.  TransCopyrighted documents may be free of charge or have micropayments attached.

Anyone can experiment with this new type of document by going to http://xanadu.com.au/transquoter/

Other middle ways.....