holmesworcester's blog

Last week we topped 10,000 signatures on Defective by Design's iPad petition, and mailed the second batch of 5,000 signatures to Steve Jobs on our own giant tablet.

The best part is, our "Apple makes totalitarian computers" meme is spreading. This weekend, NPR's "All Things Considered" ran a piece entitled "Is Apple Entering an Age of Empire?" that takes as its premise the idea that Apple is building the dystopic computing future featured in its famous "1984" Superbowl advertisement.

Slate Magazine's Farhad Manjoo (the commentator interviewed for the piece) goes far too easy on Apple, and focuses only on the danger to "the industry"-- not to society itself. But the fact that major news outlets are asking these kinds of questions is a huge victory for our campaign. You should be proud.

We're still sending a new tablet for every 5,000 signatures we receive. And we'll be mobilizing petition signers for anti-iPad actions on April 3rd when the iPad launches. So keep sharing the petition with your network!

Defective by Design has presented its petition to Jeff Bezos and Amazon, demanding that Amazon remove Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) from all their products.

Since the petition launched, Amazon has taken two small steps away from total DRM-enforced control. First, their publishing platform changed to make it easier for publishers to submit DRM-free PDFs. Second, a proprietary firmware update allowed Amazon's "Swindles" to read DRM-free PDFs that were not downloaded from Amazon.

These changes should help publishers who want to do the right thing. And the changes make it easier to push other individual publishers to sell their books DRM-free through Amazon.

These changes don't, however, fix a key problem with the Kindle -- its software is still proprietary, so Amazon still has full remote control over the materials on readers' devices.

We're submitting the petition to Amazon to remind them that the thousands of writers, readers, academics, librarians, and public intellectuals who signed our petition asked for much more: a full removal of any DRM from the ebooks Amazon sells and the "Swindle" device itself.

Until Amazon removes all DRM, Amazon is putting our basic freedoms at risk in order to lock publishers and readers into their platform, bringing us closer to the dystopia envisioned in 1984 or The Right to Read.