The Right to Read
by Richard Stallman
Table of Contents
This article appeared in the February 1997 issue ofCommunications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number2).
(from "The Road To Tycho", a collection of articlesabout the antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution, published inLuna City in 2096)
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when LissaLenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, andunless she could borrow another, she would fail her midtermproject. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lenther his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the factthat you could go to prison for many years for letting someoneelse read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Likeeveryone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharingbooks was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates woulddo.
And there wasn't much chance that the SPA--the SoftwareProtection Authority--would fail to catch him. In his softwareclass, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitorthat reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to CentralLicensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates,but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) Thenext time his computer was networked, Central Licensing wouldfind out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshestpunishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime.
Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books.She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Danknew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly affordthe tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books mightbe the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation;he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papershe read. (10% of those fees went to the researchers who wrote thepapers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hopethat his own research papers, if frequently referenced, wouldbring in enough to repay this loan.)
Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone couldgo to the library and read journal articles, and even books,without having to pay. There were independent scholars who readthousands of pages without government library grants. But in the1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had beguncharging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free publicaccess to scholarly literature were a dim memory.
There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and CentralLicensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmatein software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicitdebugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitorcode when reading books. But he had told too many friends aboutit, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward(students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but forpossessing a debugger.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone couldhave debugging tools. There were even free debugging toolsavailable on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary usersstarted using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually ajudge ruled that