Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of law, culture, technology, and politics. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.

Previous Politech message:
http://www.politechbot.com/2005/04/25/more-on-congress/


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Barlow... NOT!
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:44:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bruce R Koball <bkoball@well.com>
To: declan@well.com

oh fer cryin' out loud... the next thing you know, he'll be credited with
writing the Constitution...  Barlow has said some clever things in his day
but the "information want to be free" aphorism is not one of 'em.

That was Stewart Brand's creation, originally uttered in 1984, at the
first Hackers' Conference, and printed in a report in the May 1985 "Whole
Earth Review." It later turned up in his book, "The Media Lab:  Inventing
the Future at MIT," published in 1987:

"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."

Quite prescient...

-brk-

Posted by Declan McCullagh on Apr 28, 2005 in category free-speech

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