"Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge"
Copyright and copyleft
"FREE AS AIR, FREE AS WATER, FREE AS KNOWLEDGE" Speech) ~ Stewert Brand
"In fall 1984, at the first Hackers' Conference, I said in one discussion session: "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." That was printed in a report/transcript from the conference in the May 1985 *Whole Earth Review*, p. 49.
It quickly became one of the elements of Hacker Ethics. Note that this refers to the original use of the term 'hacker', as programmer, not as cracker.
Stewart Brand continued:
"In 'The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT', ISBN 0140097015, published by Viking Penguin in 1987 [here's the author's own review, and here's MIT Press's review], on p. 202 is a section which begins: "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."
``Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge'' Speech to the Library Information Technology Association by Bruce Sterling 1992, San Francisco CA
COPYLEFT and the Creative Commons
Copyright, Copyleft, Copywrong, Copyfight
just what are we talking about?
The answer is CONTENT.
WHAT IS CONTENT?
FREE OPEN CONTENT
Announcing the Open Content Alliance
http://www.opencontentalliance.org/
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive
introduced the Open Content Alliance.
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000192.html
