Information wants to be free

"Information wants to be free" is an expression that means either that all people should be able to access information freely, or that information (formulated as an actor) naturally strives to become as freely available among people as possible. It is often used by technology activists to criticize laws that limit transparency and general access to information. People who criticize intellectual property law say the system of such government-granted monopolies conflicts with the development of a public domain of information. The expression is often credited to Stewart Brand, who was recorded saying it at a Hackers Conference in 1984. The phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand, who, in the late 1960s, founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing. What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, although the video recording of the conversation shows that what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told Steve Wozniak: On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other. Brand's conference remarks are transcribed accurately by Joshua Gans in his research on the quote as used by Steve Levy in his own history of the phrase. A later form appears in his The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT: Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away. According to historian Adrian Johns, the slogan expresses a view that had already been articulated in the mid-20th century by Norbert Wiener, Michael Polanyi and Arnold Plant, who advocated for the free communication of scientific knowledge, and specifically criticized the patent system.

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Free-culture movement

The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media. The movement objects to what it considers over-restrictive copyright laws. Many members of the movement argue that such laws hinder creativity. They call this system "permission culture".

Hacker ethic

The hacker ethic is a philosophy and set of moral values within hacker culture. Practitioners believe that sharing information and data with others is an ethical imperative. The hacker ethic is related to the concept of freedom of information, as well as the political theories of anti-authoritarianism, anarchism, and libertarianism.

Openness

Openness is an overarching concept or philosophy that is characterized by an emphasis on transparency and collaboration. That is, openness refers to "accessibility of knowledge, technology and other resources; the transparency of action; the permeability of organisational structures; and the inclusiveness of participation". Openness can be said to be the opposite of closedness, central authority and secrecy. Openness has been attributed to a wide array of approaches in very different contexts as outlined below.

Partial Information Sharing Over Social Learning Networks

Ali H. Sayed, Virginia Bordignon

This work addresses the problem of sharing partial information within social learning strategies. In social learning, agents solve a distributed multiple hypothesis testing problem by performing two operations at each instant: first, agents incorporate inf ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023