[FC-discuss] a DRM idea

[Nicholas Reville]

Hey hey everyone,

Just jumping on this list with an idea that I'm not really in a  
position to work on right now, but want to throw out there.  With  
Apple's removal of DRM on (more of? all?) it's music, I think there's  
a very real risk that people will assume the DRM issue is dead.  For  
example, there's a feeling that because movies (dvds, blu-ray) and  
games have long come with some DRM on them, it's a non-issue for those  
formats.  That mentality could bring our great progress to a halt.

The other day, I was commenting on a DRM post by Cory on boingboing  
and I thought about what seems to be have been the most effective anti- 
DRM action since the rootkit stuff, which was people rating Spore with  
1-star on Amazon.  This strikes me as a tactic that can make a major  
financial impact on companies that use DRM and is very easy to do for  
folks that want to avoid DRM products and let others know to avoid  
them.  It could be *extremely* powerful if applied to a large number  
of products.  Imagine an executive trying to decide whether a DRM  
system is worth the 3 point drop in star ratings that he'll get if he  
deploys it.

One way to approach this would be to have a blog (defective by  
design?) that posts a new product each week that overuses DRM and asks  
people to rate it on Amazon.  That would be a great place to start--  
even on a less well known blog, we can all subscribe to the RSS feed  
and act on new posts.

  But an even stronger approach would be to write a Firefox extension  
that checks pages at Amazon and other sites against a database that  
says whether something uses DRM or not.  The extension is basically  
invisible until you come to a page that is selling a DRM-laden  
product, at which point it pops up and says-- "Hey, this product uses  
DRM, restricting what you can do after you buy it.  We recommend that  
you avoid it and that you consider rating the product."  If you can  
get someone to install the extension once, they'll probably act on it  
a whole bunch of times in the future.  It could quickly create a huge  
disincentive for any company to put DRM on a product.

So I don't know if other folks have suggested this before, but I  
wanted to get it out of my brain and towards people that might want to  
take a project like that on.

Thanks for fighting this fight everyone,

nicholas