Several organisations have joined forces to express their concern for the freedom of authors and readers, organisations that include Creative Commons, O’Reilly Media, No Starch Press, the Accessible Computing Foundation, Libre Graphics Magazine, APRIL, the Free Software Foundation and its sister organisations, FSF France and FSF India.
Matt Lee, the director of the Defective by Design campaign, says, “DRM is a problem that is growing in the area of electronic books, where people are forbidden from lending, reselling or donating their books, or reading them without being tracked, as well as copying them to a new device without having to buy them all again. Some have even seen how their books were deleted without permission by some company.” Some of the day’s activities include people who are upset about DRM holding protests and raising awareness about this in Cincinnati, Orlando, Amherst, San Francisco, Boston, Madrid, Rome, Manchester, Nagoya (Japan) and Aveiro (Portugal).
Other events keep being added at http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:DefectiveByDesign/Day_Against_DRM_2012.
Supporters are also taking action online, showing the campaign’s advertisement and taking the opportunity to write on their blogs about their frustrations with DRM. Cory Doctorow, the notable science fiction author and editor of the influential blog BoingBoing.net, has said, “As an author, I understand that DRM does nothing to protect my interests. As a businessman, I understand that DRM usurps my commercial relationship with my customers and hands it over to the DRM resellers.” Sanders Kleinfeld, author of HTML5 for publishers, said in an interview with O’Reilly Media, “The most frustrating thing right now is that Amazon is focused on its Mobi format for its Kindle device, Apple has made giant strides to move away from EPUB 3 with its iBooks 2.0 and its iBooks Author. I think the vendors that create those devices are interested in keeping that lock-in for their customers.”
Defective by Design has already held Days Against DRM before, in 2006, 2010 and 2011, focusing on the use of DRM by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and the RIAA. Defective by Design is a campaign of the Free Software Foundation.
You can find more information on how to take part at http://dayagainstdrm.org. Photos, videos will be published at http://defectivebydesign.org.