Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age: Summary & Key Insights

There’s a kind of quiet violence in the way technology can be turned against its users. Law One is my response to that reality: any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn’t give you the key, that lock isn’t for your benefit.

Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is the canonical example. It began as a way, supposedly, to prevent piracy—to stop people from copying movies, songs, books, or software. But when we look closely, DRM isn’t about stopping thieves; it’s about stopping owners. If you buy an e-book but can’t move it to another device, if you download a song but can’t legally remix or back it up, if your tractor has software you can’t access without the manufacturer’s permission, then your purchase was never truly yours. DRM, in essence, transforms ownership into a revocable license—something you can lose the moment you step outside the boundaries set by a corporation’s lawyers.

I’ve spoken to musicians whose albums were stripped from fans’ MP3 players overnight when a licensing deal expired, to developers who couldn’t repair their own tools because the company behind the software considered tampering a violation of the DMCA. These are not anomalies; they are the logical outcome of a system that defines creativity as property and audiences as suspects.

When locks are designed for control rather than protection, they break the relationship between creators and consumers. You can’t connect authentically with your readers or listeners if every interaction is mediated by encryption and permission servers. Worse still, DRM makes creators dependent on the corporations that enforce it. A novelist whose e-book is sold exclusively through Amazon cannot reach readers if Amazon decides to delist the book; a musician who relies on iTunes DRM has effectively surrendered her livelihood to Apple’s policy team.

Freedom does not mean chaos. It means trust—the confidence that, as a creator, you benefit more from enabling your audience than from policing them. History supports this. The recording industry tried to kill home taping, just as the movie industry tried to ban the VCR. Each time, the same result followed: more creativity, not less. People shared, remixed, experimented—and the industries grew. What stifles growth isn’t copying but control.

If we want a world where creators thrive, we must reject the temptation to lock everything down. Technology can enforce ownership or it can expand participation. Only one of those futures is worth building.

The second law addresses the uneasy marriage of art and commerce in the age of the internet. Fame won’t make you rich, but you can’t get paid without it. It’s a paradox I’ve lived and seen countless artists wrestle with: visibility is essential, yet visibility alone guarantees nothing.

Before the internet, visibility was scarce and expensive. Gatekeepers controlled access to distribution—record labels, publishers, broadcasters. Their approval was the price of entry. Today that’s changed. Anyone can upload an album, self-publish a novel, or stream a short film to a global audience. The cost of reaching people has collapsed, but so has the scarcity that once made attention valuable. Now, the problem isn’t getting your work into the world—it’s getting anyone to notice amid the deafening noise.

This is where I believe the metaphor of the 'gift economy' becomes powerful. When you share your work widely, you’re not devaluing it; you’re inviting participation. Free samples, Creative Commons editions, open rehearsals—these are not acts of surrender but strategies of connection. I’ve released my novels under licenses that allow readers to share and remix them. Far from cannibalizing sales, it expanded my audience; tens of thousands discovered my stories because a friend sent them a free copy. The relationship that results—direct, unmediated, and built on trust—is more robust than any corporate marketing campaign could buy.

Yet visibility without monetization can still be exploitative, and this is where creators must exercise both freedom and strategy. Platforms like YouTube or Spotify profit from streams and views, paying fractions of a cent to the artists who keep their servers alive. Social networks sell the attention that creators earn through their labor. In this arrangement, 'fame' becomes a currency that others cash in. To survive, artists must either reclaim ownership of their channels or build communities that value support over exposure.

One of the reasons I encourage open models is that they place the power to monetize back in the hands of the creator. Crowdfunding, direct patronage, merchandise, live events—these depend on the bond between artist and audience, not on platform policy. The internet can amplify both exploitation and liberation; the deciding factor is who owns the relationship.

The promise of the second law is that fame, in its best form, is a bridge between generosity and sustainability. You share to be known, you are known to be supported. The economics of the internet age aren’t about scarcity but about attention and trust. The artists who thrive are not those who hoard their work but those who build communities around it.