The Right to Read | Page 3

Right to Read
by Richard Stallman
Copyright 1996 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium,
provided this notice is preserved.

Table of Contents
Author's Note References Other Texts to Read

This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM
(Volume 40, Number 2).

The Right to Read
by Richard Stallman
Copyright 1996 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium,
provided this notice is preserved.

(from "The Road To Tycho", a collection of articles about the antecedents of the
Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2096)

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow
his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would
fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might
read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting
someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had
been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something
that only pirates would do.
And there wasn't much chance that the SPA--the Software Protection Authority--would

fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright
monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing.
(They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest
profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing
would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment--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 Dan knew she came from a middle-class family
and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be
the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to
borrow to pay for all the research papers he read. (10% of those fees went to the
researchers who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope
that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in enough to repay
this loan.)
Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read
journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars
who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both
commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047,
libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.
There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were
themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had
obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code
when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned
him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal).
In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools.
There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But
ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge
ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were
illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047
distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded
programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special
firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.
It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system
kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating
systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal,
like debuggers--you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your
computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.
Dan concluded that he couldn't simply lend Lissa his computer. But he couldn't refuse to
help her, because he loved her. Every chance to speak with her filled him with delight.
And that she chose