Stallman's dystopia comes to life

    In February 1997, Richard Stallman wrote a short story in the dystopian genre, " The right to read " ( Russian translation ), which describes the distant future of mankind. The action takes place in 2096. The story begins as follows:

    “Dan Halbert began his journey to the college uprising - when Lisa Lenz asked him to borrow a computer. Her own broke down, and without a computer she could not finish the term paper. The girl was afraid to turn to someone other than Dan.

    This put him in a dilemma. It was impossible not to help, but if you borrow your computer, Lisa can read his books. You can go to jail for many years, but Dan was shocked by the thought itself. From the first grade, schools taught everyone that sharing a book is a terrible crime, comparable to maritime piracy. ”

    Back in 1997, one could only marvel at the paranoia of Richard Stallman and envy his rich imagination. It seemed that this would never happen - society would not allow such laws to be passed, massive waves of protest would arise, right? But today we see how these forecasts are gradually being realized.

    For example, a few months ago, Amazon allowed e-book owners to lend them to friends for up to 14 days to read. In accordance withterms of use , this option is available with the permission of the seller. That is, when buying a book for Kindle, you will see a mark next to the price indicating whether you can borrow this book or not.

    Here's what Stephen Johnson (a fairly well-known American writer, author of seven books) writes on his iPad restrictions on his blog:

    “Look at this screenshot. As you all probably know, this is the new Apple iBook app for the iPad. I have shown here what happens when you try to highlight a paragraph of text. In this case, you see the familiar “pins” in the style of the iPhone and two options to choose from: Highlight (Highlight) or Bookmark(Bookmark). But you can’t just copy the text to save a quote, send an e-mail to a friend or quote from a blog. And of course, there is no way to link to it. To make matters worse, in the screenshot you see a modern edition of Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of Man, which is already in the public domain. These are our words on the screen. We have the right to them. ”

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