We somehow missed news of this, but there was a nationwide protest at various Apple Stores on Friday, trying to educate people about the dangers of DRM. The primary danger being, of course, the fact that it’s bad for consumers because it locks you in to a single competitor… if you put your head in the microwave and then decide to switch from an iPod to a Creative Zen, you need to repurchase all your iTunes songs. Ironically enough, this protest was held the same day I decided to give my aged mother my old Dell DJ and invest in an iPod myself. Unfortunately, I went to Best Buy, so I didn’t run into any of the guys at the Boston Apple store; otherwise, we might have had some of that first-hand content Ben’s always telling me I should be trying to find.

It’s a good, if perhaps idealistic, cause, so we wondered how the protest turned out: if this video of the protest at the San Francisco Apple store is any indication, each store’s protest was launched by four smelly nerds dressed in Haz Mat suits, presumably to seal off their B.O. from the ordinary people whom they deigned to edify.

There’s somehow nothing sadder than when a protest in favor of a cause you believe in only manages to pull in a handful of dudes.

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Anti-iTunes DRM demonstrations across the USA tomorrow [Boing Boing]

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