“The Right to Read” is a short work of speculative fiction by Richard Stallman, published in February 1997 in Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2). Framed as a historical note written in 2096, it tells the story of Dan Halbert, a college student in the year 2047 whose classmate Lissa Lenz asks to borrow his computer because her own has broken. The request is not casual: in Dan’s world, lending someone your computer means letting them read your books, and letting someone else read your books can send you to prison for years. As Stallman puts it, “the very idea shocked him” - the prohibition on sharing has become so internalized that the act feels not just illegal but unthinkable.
The story sketches a world built entirely out of mechanisms that, in 1997, were only beginning to appear. Every book is governed by access controls. The Software Protection Authority and the licensing system track who reads what. Debugging tools and free compilers have been outlawed or locked away because they could be used to circumvent restrictions. Students cannot afford the per-page reading fees that fund the publishers and the university. Computers are designed to monitor their owners and to report violations. Dan knows that if he lends Lissa his machine, the central licensing server will eventually record that more than one person used his books, and both of them will be exposed.
What makes the piece a deliberate warning rather than mere entertainment is the running commentary Stallman attaches in “Author’s Notes” and “Bad News” sections that he has updated over the years on gnu.org. There he points to real-world developments - copy protection, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, trusted computing, e-book licensing terms that forbid lending, and the criminalization of circumvention tools - as evidence that the fictional 2047 was drifting steadily closer. The story was written before the term “Digital Restrictions Management” was in wide use, but its central anxiety is exactly that: technology that enforces the publisher’s will against the reader rather than serving the reader.
The narrative is one of the founding cultural texts of the free software movement’s argument about freedom and control. It connects copyright maximalism, DRM, and locked-down hardware into a single trajectory and asks the reader to judge that trajectory by its endpoint. The same logic later animated the Free Software Foundation’s campaign against what it called tivoization and its insistence, in the GNU General Public License version 3, that users retain the ability to run modified software on the devices they own. “The Right to Read” remains widely cited precisely because so many of its once-fanciful details - per-use licensing, devices that refuse to run unauthorized code, the disappearance of the right to lend - became ordinary features of the digital world it was written to warn against.