Here’s another version of the DRM protest involving hazmat suits and the San Fran Apple store. It’s got less Talking Heads, more people speaking about (or, heads talking…) about why DRM is bad. If you don’t know why it is, watch. If you do and would like to have your beliefs affirmed, watch. If you like sweaty geeks, watch. All we know is DRM prevented us from easily transmogrifying our sister into the next Grandmaster Flash, so now we’re totally mad against it, even more than we were madly before.
PROTESTS
Verizon Wants to Chat About -$1000 Bill
By 6.19.06
Back in mid-may, we decided that the best way to protest the phone companies selling our records to the NSA was to send our cell phone company a bill for $1000. What we did is take our Verizon bill, deduct $1000 from it, and enclose a copy of 18 USC 2701 with relevant secitons highlighted. Specifically, those parts saying that if anyone gives up your phone records, they can get fined $1000. Obviously, this is in jest. But Verizon’s taking it seriously enough to want to schedule a conference call with us.
Anti-iTunes DRM Demonstration Brings Out The Haz Mat Nerds
By 6.12.06
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.
NYC Anti-Wal-Mart Protesters Are, In Reality, Anti-Wal-Mart Protesters
By 5.24.06
This has been going around “the blogosphere” lately (like “the Information Super Highway,” I expect that this term will become increasingly embarrassing to most of us as we get older and Al Gore claims to have created it) and it’s not quite what it appears, but it’s worth a post: coming out of Grand Central Station, Mihow from the eponymous Mihow.com encountered a raucous crowd of what appeared to be anti-Wal-Mart protesters. They handed him some literature, which then turned out to actually be pamphlets from Wal-Mart Watch.
Consumers Protest Exorbitant Text Message Prices
By 3.17.06
Here in America, we’re in the digital stone age, at least as far as how widespread the adoption of some cool new technologies are. There’s not universal broadband (which the US Government paid the telcos to implement; instead they built up more DSL because there’s more money to be made on it), wi-fi coverage is intermittent and text message use is a lot less pervasive than in most European countries. In Italy they have tons of teenagers showing up in hospitals with repetive stress injuries directly resulting from punching out reams of text messages.
