Information Wants to Be Free

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As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master. —Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"

Alice has something she wants to share with the world. A scientific advancement, most often. She's going to go public and make the world, perhaps, a little better. Maybe it's the cure for a disease, a solution for world hunger or an abundant source of energy. Maybe it's of alien origin. In any case, Alice doesn't want to limit access to it through copyrights or patents or anything of the sort.

But... uh oh, Bob doesn't like it. You see, he has ties to a big business that stands to lose a lot if that invention is released to the general public. If only Alice wasn't so into this "free for everybody" nonsense, they could do some business exploiting the oppressed masses like he has been doing with much success so far. Alice must die, and her research with it.

It is the quest of the heroes to save Alice's precious information and release it before the Big Bad can usurp it or destroy it. In the process, they may find out there were those with similar discoveries who were Killed to Uphold the Masquerade.

Plots following this trope in Twenty Minutes Into the Future (or Like Reality Unless Noted) settings tend to end with the villain realizing he Can't Stop the Signal even if he manages to stop the idealistic character.

Super-Trope of Withholding the Cure. Compare Keeping Secrets Sucks. Contrast Digital Piracy Is Evil.

Examples of Information Wants to Be Free include:

Anime and Manga

• Sand Land concerns the efforts of the main characters to find an oasis in a world that's nothing but desert. They're opposed by the king and his government who control the only other source of water.
• This is the reason for Laughing Man's struggle in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. A scientist found an effective cure for cyberbrain sclerosis (a phenomenon where people with electronic brain implants would have parts of their organic brains harden, essentially the future version of alzheimers and AIDS), but various people with ties to nanobot companies surpressed the discovery (they didn't outright kill the scientist, just discredited him and arranged a media blackout) so that they could continue selling expensive nanobot treatments which (at the time) were much less effective.
• This is the main conflict of Gundam Unicorn and the Laplace Box: It contains the original draft of the colonies' charter, stating that they were always meant to be free from the Earth governments. Meaning that Zeon was right all along!

Comics

• The comic Toxic Planet is set in an unbelievably polluted future (everyone wears a gas mask all the time). At one point, the oil reserves finally, completely dry up, and the politicians look around for solutions. One Beleaguered Assistant mentions he remembers a scientist who'd found a way to completely eliminate the need for oil. The next panel has a skeleton in a lab coat shackled to the dungeon wall, while the guard asks "You sure this is the guy you want?".

Film

• In Unknown, the assassins' goal is to prevent the open-source release of a new variety of corn on behalf of agribusiness giants.
• In Anti Trust, the Big Bad Corrupt Corporate Executive acquires code for his Killer App through multiple crimes, up to and including murder. The good guys, upon exposing him, release the source code online, accompanied by an e-mail saying, "Human knowledge belongs to the world".
• In Tron: Legacy, Sam Flynn stages an undercover operation to release the source code of Encom's operating system to the public (he's the main stockholder of the company, it's legal for him to do so).
  • Handled with all the subtlety of a speeding truck in the first film, making it another example of Older Than They Think. Dillinger and Master Control locked down all information and user access on our side of the screen, and it took the form of a totalitarian state on the other side of the screen. The User-Believer Programs frequently speak of their longing for a "free system" while Sark and Master control speak of "control" and "order." The lockdown is also why Alan and Lora decide to team up with Flynn in order to get Tron online in the first place.
• The movie Johnny Mnemonic tells us about a man with a cybernetic brain implant designed to store information. The information he's hired to keep turns out to be the cure for a global disease, while Big Pharma thugs want to steal his head so the cure won't be given to the public. On the flip side, the underground resistance fighting the corporations want to share the information for free.
• The Saint with Val Kilmer. The female lead has invented cold fusion, thus solving the world's energy problems. Naturally, many folks want this information quashed.

Literature

• "The Green Leopard Plague", a short story by Walter Jon Williams (available here) features this regarding hunger; the main character uncovers the history of how the invention of photosynthesis in humans to combat hunger was suppressed by regimes who used it as a weapon.
• Printcrime, a short-story by Cory Doctorow, is about a corrupt, corporatist regime trying to supress the use of a new type of 3D printer. They are about as successful as you would probably expect.
• The Lost Symbol has the antagonist trying to destroy all evidence of scientific research proving Noetic Science.

Live Action TV

• An episode of Touched By an Angel revolved around a retired engineer who developed a device that could split water into oxygen and hydrogen with only a small input of sunlight. He sold it to the president of an energy company, who promptly destroyed the prototype and all the plans so that he could keep making a killing on oil.
• An episode of Sliders had the heroes hit a world close to ours but suffocating under a dictatorship. They manage to distribute a copy of the otherwise-unfamilar Bill of Rights by outright email spam.
  • Though it's hard to believe that there would be public access to the Internet in J Edgar Hoover's fascist America, or that he'd manage to repress all copies held outside the USA.
• Inverted in The Lone Gunmen episode "Like Water for Gasoline". Langley, Byers and Frohike are trying to find an experimental prototype water-powered car before an agent of an oil company, who presumably intends to destroy it. It turns out that the agent wants to see it mass-manufactured, and its original creator hid it away because he realized that freedom from oil would ultimately mean more cars and more consumption - his "miracle" would accelerate corporate devastation of the environment rather than stop it.
  • But played straight and cranked Up to Eleven any other time. They are three underground journalists who allied themselves with Fox Mulder and not only work on exposing the alien conspiracy, but many of the more mundane unsavory dealings of corporations and government.

Mythology

• The Greek god Prometheus stole the secret of making fire from the Olympian gods and, as you could say, put it in the public domain for all mortals to use. Zeus was not amused. (He got better though.) Incredibly, this makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.

Real Life

• The phrase is attributed to Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, whose original quote covered both sides' motives:

"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."

• Anonymous can be considered this.
• Wiki Leaks can also be considered this.

Tabletop Games

• Mage: The Ascension: The Virtual Adepts practically breathe this trope.
  • They do include a variant on that theme. The Cypherpunks believe that information doesn't want to be free; it wants to flow, travelling to the places where it is most useful. Truly free information would be like a flood, where the user is overwhelmed by massive amounts of information that is not relevant to him/her at the time. Meanwhile, information that is useful could be drowned out by the information that isn't.

Video Games

• Dr. Alex Mercer in Prototype would have released the secrets of the Blacklight Virus to all of New York City. Blackwatch and its partner, Gentek, weren't about to let that happen. In this case, however, the secret-holder's motives were not at all altruistic, the ultimate goal being simply to become too dangerous to eliminate, get up the nose of the former employers, and failing that, go out with one hell of a bang.

Web Comics

• Early on in Schlock Mercenary, the mercenaries are attacked repeatedly by the F'sherl Ganni Gatekeepers, due to experimenting with (and holding the patent for) the 'Teraport', a method of Faster-Than-Light Travel that far outstrips the unwieldy Portal Network that got the F'sherl Ganni their name as well as discovering that said Portal Network also works as a series of duplicators allowing the F'sherl Ganni to torture clones of their MILLIONS of users for information then kill them. Finally, Admiral Breya Andreyasn figures out that there's a way to stop the attacks: Release the Teraport into Open Source, essentially spreading the technology freely across the galaxy, and removing the Gatekeepers' reason to specifically target Targon's Toughs.
  • This has the unfortunate side effect of starting a LOT of wars.
  • During the HTRN takedown arc, Petey quotes the trope name when letting the battleplate Popagai know that the Fleetmind warship Plaited Daisies was broadcasting their communications on an open channel so that Tagon was also in the loop.
• Parodied in Freefall, as the trope name is the catchphrase of resident Robotic Mad Scientist Qwerty. First he accidentally invents robot poison and uploads the schematics to the internet. Then someone points out how it be used to kill robots without a trace, and then he uploads that to the internet. It turns out that after his owner died, he mechanized his corpse for a Day of the Dead celebration. Which wouldn't have been too bad, except he uploaded the plans for that as well. It was very memorable.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, when Dean Martin steals Jean Poule's research data to make a monster of his own, he justifies the theft by saying, "But information wants to be free! I had a public duty to steal it!"