Protesting Apple's DRM

tedet writes "On the heels of the recent DRM news from Bruce Perens, the UK Parliament, and the Norwegian Omsbudman, Defective By Design is planning a flash protest this coming Saturday targeting Apple Stores throughout the United States. Defective by Design is targeting Apple because '[a]s the largest distributor of DRM infected technology, Apple has set a new low in the mistreatment of our freedoms.' We can expect more hazmat suits, and they created some art specific to this action. Hopefully these direct actions by Defective by Design will get the U.S. up-to-speed with its continental counterparts." (Of course, some people are happy with Apple's DRM as a compromise which helped legitimize online music sales.)

We're sending a message to consumers not to Apple

[Markusis]

The bigger problem with this whole DRM mess is that consumers don't really understand what they're buying. They don't understand that Apple controls everything about what they can do with the content that they're buying. They don't know that they're giving up rights that they have always had in order to get music on to their iPod.

To answer the poster who said that this protest is misdirected and that it should be targetting the RIAA, if the RIAA had stores set up in malls that gather lots of foot traffic we might be targetting them as well. But like I said, it's not really about telling Apple that the process stinks, it's about telling consumers. This of course means that the main goal is to have the protest picked up by some mainstream media outlets (even small local newspapers and such).

The real problem is that the situation we have now is one where the law didn't fit the needs of big-media, so they made the technology work the way they wanted __in spite of the law__.

How cool would it be if there was a law that said it was illegal to create a copy protection mechanism that offered the copyright holder more rights than the law did. Since such a law will probably never exist the market is our only chance to change how the system works and that involves informing consumers.

Lying doesn't help, either.

[argent]

Well, they may not be lying. They may be terminally clueless. Nobody who's even just been following the debate could have missed this stuff:

They claimed that Apple limits the number of copies you can make of a song. That's not true, you can burn as many copies of a song as you want. You just have to make a new playlist now and then (which is pretty easy, it's about 3 clicks and a drag).

They claimed that Apple was the biggest distributor of DRM in the world. Not even close. Microsoft beats them hollow, and the DVD industry makes both look like small potatoes.