Hello all, This is the review of yesterdays Defective By Design event outside of the Apple Store in Regents Street.
----- Hello all, A quick review of todays Anti-DRM event. I would judge today as a success by considering a few different factors. We had between 14 and 18 people giving out leaflets and offering information to the passing public. What struck me most was a young American guy around 16-17 years old. He wasn't a member of Defective By Design.. he wasn't a member of GLLUG but he had come across the event on the Internet whilst researching his options on migrating to GNU/Linux from Windows. We had a chat as he distributed leaflets and he said the only factor holding him back from moving away from Windows was his iTunes library and his iPod. Interesting to see that although I and others were there protesting against a situation that doesn't affect us directly (I don't use iTunes at all) people were using the occasion to demonstrate their genuine dissatisfaction. The event started with myself and one other participant walking up into the top of the Apple store with leaflets concealed cunningly about our person. I managed to distribute leaflets to nearly everyone on the upper level and have a decent chat with a group of people before I was asked to leave. The other participant distributed leaflets to the long checkout queue on the bottom floor. After being escorted out of the store we met the HAZMAT suited participants being stopped and briefed by a police officer. To his credit the officer just warned us about causing a public nuisance and wished up good luck. The HAZMAT suits were a good attention grabber and we distributed over 3,200 leaflets in 2 hours and 15 minutes. The feedback from the public that took leaflets was probably about 50% fairly non-interested and took the leaflet away, 35% read the leaflet on the spot and took in the placards and paid some interest and the remaining 15% asked at least what it was we were demonstrating against and allowed us to educate them. I didn't speak to anyone who was in favour of DRM.. the public awareness of the technology is definitely there and some people had a high awareness. Only a very few people raised the topic of illegal file sharing networks. The highlight of the day for me were 2 people who had stopped after the shout of "If you are buying iPods today please take a leaflet" and spoke to a demonstrator. After reading the leaflet and having a chat they turned about and announced they weren't going into the store at all now. A lot of photos were taken today and they should appear in the Flickr group tonight or tomorrow. ---- As posted to my local LUG. Photos are online: http://pics.tgb.org.uk/defectivebydesignlondon/ http://www.flickr.com/groups/defectivebydesign/pool/ .. and people have started to blog it ... http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/tretout/entry/anti-drm_campaign_apple/ http://blog.tgb.org.uk/articles/2006/10/01/defective-by-design A great day out in my opinion.. thanks to Mr Bowker for organising it. ~sm _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
