Stewart Brand of the famous “Information wants to be free” statement has actually commented in more detail:
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.
I revisited the above because of the recent Stratfor 2012 email leak. It represents the tension clearly: Stratfor sells expensive intelligence services (information), while in fact information once generated and stored (electronically) is bound to break free.
Managing organized complexity 