The Right to Read

Do you have a right to read? Of course you do - books are available for reading all over the place. It sounds silly to suggest that people don't have a right to read things, but perhaps it isn't really so silly after all. In 1997 Richard Stallman wrote a short story about a boy, Dan Halbert, who in the year 2047 was faced with a moral dilemma: if he doesn't allow his friend Lissa Lenz to use his computer, she'll fail her midterm project; if he does, she might read the books he has stored there - which is why lending her his computer is illegal.

You can read (yes, really!) the story on gnu.org:

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.

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. ... 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.

Sound far-fetched? Stallman added some notes in 2002:

[M]ost of the specific laws and practices described above have already been proposed; many have been enacted into law in the US and elsewhere. In the US, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act established the legal basis to restrict the reading and lending of computerized books (and other data too). ... Until recently, there was one exception: the idea that the FBI and Microsoft will keep the root passwords for personal computers, and not let you have them, was not proposed until 2002. It is called "trusted computing" or "palladium".

In 2001, Disney-funded Senator Hollings proposed a bill called the SSSCA that would require every new computer to have mandatory copy-restriction facilities that the user cannot bypass. Following the Clipper chip and similar US government key-escrow proposals, this shows a long-term trend: computer systems are increasingly set up to give absentees with clout control over the people actually using the computer system. The SSSCA has since been renamed to the CBDTPA (think of it as the "Consume But Don't Try Programming Act").

Stallman' story is rather scary, but even more scary is the idea of how much of it is already in place and how much of it is being proposed by various media industries today. There seems little question to the idea that various industries want to exercise as much control as possible over the materials you read or view. Taken to their logical conclusion, these policies and laws could result in restrictions on people's right to read - and that, in turn, will infringe on people's right to speak as well.

Read More:

• Recent Books on Free Speech
• Court Decisions on Free Speech and Censorship