"In 'The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT', ISBN 0140097015, published by Viking Penguin in 1987 on p. 202 is a section which begins: "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." 
"The final iteration for me was in sundry talks I gave in the two years after the Media Lab book came out. In those I frequently said, and even put up on an overhead, the following (this one happened to be a national Computer Security conference): "Information wants to be free (because of the new ease of copying and reshaping and casual distribution), AND information wants to be expensive (it's the prime economic event in an information age)... and technology is constantly making the tension worse. If you cling blindly to the expensive part of the paradox, you miss all the action going on in the free part. The pressure of the paradox forces information to explore incessantly. Smart marketers and inventors quietly follow-and I might add, so do smart computer security people." 
"Since then I've added nothing to the meme, and it's been living high wide and handsome on its own. I see in a WIRED, April 97, that Jon Katz opines on p. 186: "The single dominant ethic in this [digital] community is that information wants to be free"."