I have been listening to my friend Stewart Brand's nonsense that 'information wants to be free' and the phantasmagorical academic world of Larry Lessig who has several similar notions about property rights on the web that are completely off base.
The first good counter arguments are in the Claremont Review of Books by James V. DeLong (Fall 2008) who is appropriately at a legal think tank in D.C.
The Lessig group points to Wikipedia and Linux and yells for net neutrality, cooperative vs competitive, anti-corporate, wisdom of crowds and the power of altruism.
The web was founded with two initial advantages: (a) there was so much dark fiber, no one cared about scarce resources and(b) most of the previous 2500 years of human creativity was free to be digitized. Wikipedia is the Britannica kept up to date and expanded but it does not include creative new material that needs property protection to generate it.
Linux is Unix updated by serious paid programmers at IBM, HP, Sun and a few other corporations and is merely error checked by a mass of unpaid bug checkers.
Most creativity, good editing and news reporting in the world is done by paid professionals. Only property rights can make that happen over a long period of time.