Controversial The DRM Chair

DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is a very annoying inconvenience applied to all manner of software, video and audio media. It's allegedly added to thwart piracy, although in practice it does nothing of the kind as we all know. Instead, it just locks honest customers into that company's eco system, for example Apple's so-called "Fairplay" DRM system which locks music to iTunes, killing competition. Thankfully, music is also available DRM-free nowadays on iTunes, of course.

This useless idea has now been applied to physcial furniture as a proof of concept by a group of people who entered the deconstruction.org contest which is all about:

The Deconstruction is about re-thinking the world as we know it, taking it apart, making a few adjustments, then putting it back together a little awesomer-er. It’s a light-hearted competition/ game, but it’s really more of a large-scale collaboration between friends, teams, and the public. The concept is to make the world a slightly better, more fun, and more interesting place over 48 hours. The event is open to anyone, anywhere, of any age and skill level.

The team made a simple wooden chair that can be sat on just 8 times. The number of sits could have been set to anything, but 8 was chosen so that each member of the team could sit on it precisely once:

The DRM Chair has only a limited number of use before it self-destructs. The number of use was set to 8, so everyone could sit down and enjoy a single time the chair.

Neat.

The chair contains a small sensor and electronics to hold a count of the number of sits left available, which decrements by one whenever a sitter unsits. After the 8th unsit, the circuit melts the glue (blue areas) holding the chair together and it collapses after a few seconds.

The project took 48 hours to complete from construction to final video shooting and the chair was made by Thibault Brevet in collaboration with Gianfranco Baechtold, Laurent Beirnaert, Pierre Bouvier, Raphaël Constantin, Lionel Dalmazzini, Edina Desboeufs, Arthur Desmet and Thomas Grogan.

This is a nice illustration of the rabid anti-consumer nature of DRM, which is applied so liberally by copyright maximalists such as the big movie and sound studios and software companies. Applying DRM to real, physical objects shows just how absurd the whole concept is, so we need to see more examples like this chair.

It also shows just how ungreen the whole DRM concept is as well, for those that are into the whole green notion, since the chair turns into a pile of junk when the DRM kicks in, forcing a would-be customer to buy a new one after a much shorter time than if it were to wear out naturally.

The video can be watched here. Oh and the video can also be download in various formats - all DRM-free, of course.