Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling's non-fiction book _The Hacker Crackdown_ covers the era pretty well, and is freely available. Sterling, after all, coined the very phrase "Information wants to be free."
per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
the phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand
"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."
http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html