Defective by Design

Overview

Defective By Design is an anti-digital rights management (DRM) campaign by the Free Software Foundation, which accuses DRM technology of restricting consumer’s ability to freely use purchased movies, music, literature, software and hardware.

Background

In May 2006, the Defective By Design^[2] campaign was launched by the Free Software Foundation non-profit with support by the online advocacy campaign development organization CivicActions. That month, the campaign held an anti-DRM protest at the Windows Hardware Engineering Community conference at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, Washington.^[1]

Notable Developments

Freedom Rings the RIAA

On June 23rd, 2006, Defective By Design led a phone-in protest against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), during which over 3,600 people called various recording industry executives to question their use of DRM.

Amazon Tagging Campaign

In October 2006, Defective By Design launched an “Amazon product tagging campaign,”^[3] inviting participants to tag products on Amazon with the “defectivebydesign” tag if they contain DRM and with the tag “drmfree” if they did not.

Day Against DRM

On October 3rd, 2006, Defective By Design held the first “Day Against DRM” event outside of several Apple stores in the United States and United Kingdom, where participants wore hazmat suits and handed out leaflets outlining how Apple used DRM on iTunes and iPod media players.

During the International Day Against DRM held on May 3rd, 2013, Defective By Design held an event in which they rolled out a red carpet at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to deliver more than 22,500 signatures from people opposing including DRM in HTML5 technology.^[5] During the eighth International Day Against DRM on May 6th, 2014, the Electronic Frontier Foundation held a live webinar on YouTube to “educate people about the threats of digital rights management” (shown below). In April 2015, Defective By Design announced the ninth International Day Against DRM event to be held on May 6th.

Search Interest

External References