The right to read is a battle being fought today. Although it may
take 50 years for our present way of life to fade into obscurity, most
of the specific laws and practices described above have already been
proposed; many have been enacted into law in the US and elsewhere. In
the US, the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) established the legal
basis to restrict the reading and lending of computerized books (and
other works as well). The European Union imposed similar restrictions
in a 2001 copyright directive. In France, under the DADVSI law
adopted in 2006, mere possession of a copy of DeCSS, the free program
to decrypt video on a DVD, is a crime.
