Information Wants to Be Free
Phrase from hacker culture asserting information should be freely accessible. Stewart Brand: information wants to be free and expensive—tension between these. Open source, piracy, wikileaks embody the principle. Critique of intellectual property and paywalls. Knowledge commons versus enclosure. Conflict with creators' need for compensation. Copyright reform debates. Academic open access movement. Napster, BitTorrent, Sci-Hub as implementations. Freedom of information as political act.
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