reading has never been one of the rights reserved to copyright holders under us copyright law, and in fact there are a number of carve-outs in us copyright law to ensure that copyright holders cannot prevent people from reading their work, such as the first-sale doctrine and the exemption for copying an executable into memory

there have at times been regimes that legally restricted the mere reading of published works, but such policies have generally been considered repugnant to liberal democracy and indeed liberalism in general