"Why Software Should Not Have Owners" (1994) is a distinct essay from why-software-should-be-free and makes a different argument: rather than arguing primarily for the social benefits of free software, it argues directly against the legitimacy of the copyright system as applied to software. Where the earlier essay was economic, this one is political.
stallman's argument is that software ownership — the legal regime by which a person or company can restrict copying, modification, and redistribution of software — is not a natural or necessary institution but a social construction that requires justification on the grounds of public benefit. He contends that the copyright system for software fails this test: it does not produce sufficient social benefit to justify the harms it imposes, and those harms are severe — users denied the ability to study and fix their tools, programmers forbidden to build on existing work, communities split by secrets and nondisclosure.
The essay engages with the "incentives" argument for intellectual property directly. The claim that creators need monopoly rights to be motivated to create is, stallman argues, empirically dubious for software specifically. The mit-ai-lab hacker culture during mit-ai-lab-hacker-culture-1971-1984 produced enormous amounts of highly useful software without proprietary incentives. And the entire gnu-project — an attempt to produce a complete operating system — was organized without them.
The four-freedoms framework underpins the essay's positive alternative: software users should be free to run, study, modify, and redistribute programs. These freedoms are not possible under a copyright regime that reserves exclusive rights to the owner. copyleft — as implemented in gpl-v1 and subsequently gpl-v2 — is stallman's legal response to this situation: using copyright law to guarantee the very freedoms that copyright ordinarily restricts.
The essay anticipates later debates about software-patents-opposition and digital-restrictions-management, though it focuses specifically on copyright. It should be read alongside did-you-say-intellectual-property, which makes the additional argument that the concept of "intellectual property" itself obscures more than it reveals by lumping together legally and morally distinct regimes.