2006 October Archive at Dreamland Industries

Day Against DRM — TODAY!

Well. Actually this event took place…eh…a couple of days ago (3 october). Not today, that is.

But still! Good that people stand up against certain companies and interest groups willingness to put Digital “Rights” Management into everything. Cory “BoingBoing” Doctorow wrote an interesting article regarding the future of High Definition Video and concludes, surprisingly ;-), that it’s bad for consumers and bad for Hollywood.

Even though these are interesting and important issues/perspectives relevant to IxS design, I will put them aside for now. I assume BoingBoing and Copyriot will push issues like these further. What I would like to talk about today is an example of asynchronous communication.

In January I got fed up with Apples DRM when trying to put music (Arcade Fire), bought through iTunes Store (then iTunes Music Store), on to my iAudio U2. I had forgot that a few tracks in my music collection was possessed by the devils rights management and got quite annoyed when Apple stopped me from listening to my music on the bus. But instead of signing petitions or writing angry letters to the Swedish king demanding justice and public execution I decided to deal with it in a more creative and cowardly manner: I made an Apple advertising satire. When done, since I didn’t really know what to do with it, I dropped it in my Flickr account and put it in my .Mac portfolio. Back then I wasn’t a regular Flickr user, but considered it a future photo sharing possibility (since then I’ve dropped my .Mac subscription and try to delve deeper into different personal and professional possible uses of Flickr and other “free” services).

In August I started displaying more photos on Flickr. In doing so I got curious about the different ways to use, misuse, communicate with and through the service and suddenly noticed that I had a few messages in my FlickrMail inbox! “Grand!” I thought. “People like me!”. In my FlickrMail I found four messages: two from the “system” and two from a mysterious stranger called Gregory. They were written in May and June and politely asked if the organization G represented (Defective by Design) could get permission using my Apple ad in their campaign against DRM. Since they were in a bit of a hurry they needed my permission “in the next 24 hours”. Sweaty frustration from my side, since I read this message in August and Gregory had sent it in June. And it would have been great to have one of my illustrations being used in a national/international campaign against DRM. At least I hope my illustration inspired them. And I think my illustration is more beautiful.