Okay, I'm not really doing any work today.

So I came across some stuff about paid vs. free content (the topic was about paying for newspapers online). Several different essays make reference to Stewart Brand, he of the "information wants to be free" idea.

Turns out the real quote is more complicated than that. Here's the whole passage:

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 (technological) devices makes the tension worse, not better.