Stallman's dystopia comes to life

In February 1997, Richard Stallman wrote a short story in the dystopia genre The Right to Read ( Russian translation ), which describes the distant future of humanity. The action takes place in 2096. The story begins like this:

“Dan Halbert started his way to College Uprising - when Lisa Lenz asked him to borrow a computer. Her own was broken, and without a computer she could not finish a term paper. The girl was afraid to speak 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 at the very thought. From the first grade, everyone was told that sharing a book is a terrible crime, comparable to maritime piracy. ”

Back in 1997, one could only marvel at Richard Stallman's paranoia and envy his rich imagination. It seemed that this would never happen - society will not allow such laws to be passed, mass waves of protest will rise, right? But today we see how these forecasts are gradually being implemented.
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For example, a few months ago, Amazon allowed owners of e-books to borrow them for their friends to read for up to 14 days. In accordance with the terms of use , this option is available with the permission of the seller. That is, when you buy a book for the Kindle, you will see a mark near the price indicating whether you can borrow this book or not.

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

“Look at this screenshot. As you all probably know, this is the new Apple iBook app for iPad. I showed here what happens when I try to select 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 (Set Bookmark). But you can not just copy the text to keep a quote at home, send an email to a friend or quote to a blog. And of course, there is no way to link to it. Worse, you can see in the screenshot a modern edition of the book by Charles Darwin “The Origin of Man”, which is already in the public domain. These are our words on the screen. We have the right to them. ”