"The Right to Read," published in Communications of the ACM in February 1997, is stallman's most widely read piece of speculative fiction — a short story set in a near-future America where reading any document without a valid license is a criminal offense. The story is accompanied by footnotes in the manner of stallman's philosophical essays, linking the fiction to real-world trends in digital rights management, trusted computing, and copyright enforcement. It was written during the gpl-and-linux-era-1991-1998.
The story follows Dan Halbert, a student at MIT in 2047, who lends his computer's reading access to a fellow student, Lissa. Lissa cannot afford to read the books needed for her coursework. Dan knows that sharing access is a serious crime; he also knows that the Anti-Copying Department monitors computer activity and that other students have been expelled for violations. The story is a parable about the end state of a rights-management trajectory that stallman saw beginning in the 1990s.
The genius of "The Right to Read" as a rhetorical device is that it makes stallman's abstract concerns about digital-restrictions-management concrete and human. The reader identifies with Dan's dilemma — loyalty to a friend versus compliance with an unjust law — before any technical argument has been made. The story establishes emotional stakes that the footnotes then connect to real legislation (the then-emerging Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and real technologies (content-scrambling systems, trusted computing proposals).
The footnotes to the story identify specific companies and legislative developments that the story's background technology resembles. Some predictions proved accurate: the DMCA was enacted in 1998, trusted computing platforms (TPM chips) became standard hardware, and streaming services routinely prevent users from reading or viewing content outside licensed devices. The scenario of academic materials locked behind per-access fees describes the state of academic publishing in 2010s.
The essay connects to stallman's later work on can-you-trust-your-computer, where the "trusted computing" framing (trusted by whom?) is more explicitly analyzed. It also connects to right-to-read as a concept: the freedom to read without surveillance or restriction is, for stallman, the analog of software freedom for the domain of text. larry-lessig's work on copyright and the commons, developed slightly later, addresses overlapping territory from a legal rather than ethical perspective. The story's continued relevance — as e-book DRM, streaming, and surveillance capitalism became mainstream — has made it one of stallman's most frequently cited works.