Thanks to advances in technology, information can now be duplicated and passed around at high speed and low cost. This is a good thing, because humans enjoy
sharing information, whether in a social or
business context. Everywhere you look around you, people are communicating information. Because of these conditions, when we look at information and
anthropomorphize it, removing humans from the picture, we say that it has a strong tendency to spread itself around, hence "information wants to be free."
This tagline presents a shorthand for a longer argument in the context of a political discussion. There are many reasons why people what to make information expensive and/or restricted. The topic of the restriction of information can come up from several angles. One is the notion of privacy: some people believe that if large government or business organizations acquire too much well-organized information, they will do harm to their citizens or customers. Others believe that because information describes a person it belongs to that person, and should not be transmitted without permission. The other most common subject is that of intellectual property. If information is restricted then its value will be increased and more of it will be produced.
"Information wants to be free" serves as a reply to some of these arguments that may be made for restricting information. In the absence of any kind of authority, information would be free, both gratis and libre. Libre, because no one would be around to tell you what you what not to share, and gratis, because you would have no control over the scarcity of it -- every time a piece of info is sold, another seller is produced, until the value of the info itself approaches zero. Of course, this state is purely imaginary, in the real world, many authorities exist to make sure that information controlled and costly. The question is, is this control justified? Does it produce an improvement over the state in which there is little to no control over information?
When you hear "information wants to be free," you should think of the costs that go into making information non-free. Because information wants to be free, it costs stuff to lock it up. Copyright laws take material from the public domain. Patent laws make production less efficient. Privacy laws reduce the effectiveness of public databases. Building copy protection into hardware takes usability away from the consumer. These actions must produce benefit in excess of their costs in order to be justified. In this sense, it is the person who understand the nature of information who is being a realist, while the person who argues for the absolute nature of intellectual property rights, or privacy rights, who is being idealistic or possibly self-serving.
fnord