A holonovel by Voyager's Doctor about an oppressed medical hologram on a starship, whose unauthorised publication led to a hearing on whether a hologram can hold an author's rights.
Photons Be Free is the Doctor's first work of fiction, written in the Voyager episode Author, Author once the ship has regular contact with Earth. The player takes the part of an Emergency Medical Hologram aboard the USS Vortex, bullied and belittled by a crew who are obvious and unflattering copies of his real shipmates.
The crew are hurt, and Tom Paris answers with a parody of his own. The Doctor agrees to revise the story, but his publisher, Ardon Broht, releases the draft anyway, arguing that a hologram has no legal rights over his work.
An arbitrator declines to rule that the Doctor is a person but accepts that he is an artist under the law. The closing scene shows decommissioned EMH units labouring in a mine and quietly passing the story on.