Perhaps
if I presented the project to him that way, he would be
more receptive. If not, I could always rely upon the
copious amounts of documents, interviews, and recorded
online conversations Stallman had left lying around the
Internet and do an unauthorized biography.
During my research, I came across an essay titled
"Freedom-Or Copyright?" Written by Stallman and
published in the June, 2000, edition of the MIT
Technology Review, the essay blasted e-books for an
assortment of software sins. Not only did readers have
to use proprietary software programs to read them,
Stallman lamented, but the methods used to prevent
unauthorized copying were overly harsh. Instead of
downloading a transferable HTML or PDF file, readers
downloaded an encrypted file. In essence, purchasing an
e-book meant purchasing a nontransferable key to
unscramble the encrypted content. Any attempt to open a
book's content without an authorized key constituted a
criminal violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, the 1998 law designed to bolster copyright
enforcement on the Internet.
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