“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable.  The right information in the right place just changes your life.  On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.  So you have these two fighting against each other.”  

    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.

    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.