Science must push copyright aside by Richard M. Stallman Many
points that lead to a conclusion that software freedom must be
universal often apply to other forms of expressive works, albeit
in different ways. This essay concerns the application of
principles related to software freedom to the area of
literature. Generally, such issues are orthogonal to software
freedom, but we include essays like this here since many people
interested in Free Software want to know more about how the
principles can be applied to areas other than software. (This
article appeared in Nature magazine's webdebates forum in 2001.)
It should be a truism that the scientific literature exists to
disseminate scientific knowledge, and that scientific journals
exist to facilitate the process. It therefore follows that rules
for use of the scientific literature should be designed to help
achieve that goal. The rules we have now, known as copyright,
were established in the age of the printing press, an inherently
centralized method of mass-