The Right to Read

This is a short story book. 'The Right to Read' is a short story by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, which was first published in 1997 in Communications of the ACM. It is a cautionary tale set in the year 2047, when DRM-like technologies are employed to restrict the readership of books: when the sharing of books and written material is a crime punishable by imprisonment. In particular, it touches on the impact of such a system on the requirements of university students, one (Dan Halbert) of whom is forced into a dilemma in which he must decide whether to loan his computer to a fellow student (Lissa Lenz), who may or may not illegally access his purchased documents.