Chair With DRM Collapses After Being Sat On Eight Times

[Steven Bogos]

Chair With DRM Collapses After Being Sat On Eight Times

[vimeo=60475086]

A team of creators explore the scary thought of Digital Rights Management protocols being applied to real-world objects.

DRM is hated at its worst, tolerated at its best, and is (at the moment) exclusive to digital media: videogames, movies, ebooks and music. "Limited installs," which limit the amount of times you can re-install a game, is a form of DRM most PC gamers have wrestled with at one point or another. But what if such DRM was applied to real-world objects? A team of creators working on a global project called "DRM Chair," [http://thedeconstruction.org/] which falls apart after being used just eight times.

At a casual glance, the DRM Chair looks just like your average everyday wooden chair. However, a special built-in mechanism and sensor count how many people have sat in it, emitting a loud clicking noise to indicate the number of uses left after a person stands up. After eight people have used the chair, its joints start smoking, melting the special material that holds the chair together and causing it to collapse into a heap of parts after just a few seconds.

The Deconstruction is a global project for creators, described as "a game about re-thinking the world as we know it, taking it apart, making a few adjustments, then putting it back together a little awesome-er." Teams participate by thinking up and building projects in a short time frame. The DRM Chair was thought up and put together in just 48 hours.

The chair certainly makes some interesting commentary about the nature of DRM, and how something we have come to begrudgingly accept on our digital media seems absolutely absurd when applied to real-world objects. Most recently, "Always-Online" DRM has been making gamers froth at the mouth. Ubisoft vowed to complete disaster, [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/119443-Ubisoft-Ditches-Always-On-DRM] mostly due to its always-online requirement.

Source: Cnet [http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57572405-1/drm-chair-self-destructs-after-just-eight-uses/]

Permalink

 

[Twilight_guy]

Compare real life to piracy: YOU CAN'T DO THAT ITS DIGITAL MEDIA AND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID!
Compare DRM to real life: Yeah that's right, this totally supports my ideas and shows how right I am!

It's a fun little absurdity but by no means anywhere near a valid comparison. Still, it's an interesting idea.

 

[Eleuthera]

Now I want to see an always-online table. Or a way to reconstitute the chair after donating talking to customer service...

 

[Lillowh]

Honestly, I feel like this gets the point across better http://wearcam.org/seatsale/ but still a good project.

 

[Evil Smurf]

*starts downloading "chair.torrent"*

It's a good thing DRM does not happen with physical things.

Please don't ban me.

 

[Robot Number V]

*looks at chair*

....Because it's not. It's a chair.

...What I'm trying to say is that the two things aren't really comparable.

 

[Vault101]

I didnt know limited installed was a thing

thats essentially rendering a product you PAID for useless after a certain amount of time

 

[rofltehcat]

Are they even still having install limits like they used to when Spore etc. were around?

Anyways, the next step should be a folding chair that remembers your butt and collapses if someone else tries to sit on it. Of course it would be always online (collapse if disconnect), always uploading the time, your weight, your body temperature etc. (they sell those to marketing firms... prepare for fitness drink comercials etc.) to make sure nobody sits on it unless they buy a 10? pass.
If you want to use it without internet, you get a small RFID implanted into your butt cheek (much like dogs are marked in their neck).

 

[mokes310]

...It's a fun little absurdity but by no means anywhere near a valid comparison. Still, it's an interesting idea.

I disagree. I think the primary issue here is first sale. When I pay money for this product, do I own it wholly, or is the use of this product dependent upon a second or third party fulfilling an obligation? When I buy a cd, I can play it as many times as I want, I can loan it to a friend, etc, etc. I can do that because the product is mine.

The difference here is that with DRM, you can't/don't fully own the product you've paid for. In essence, you are leasing this product from the creator for a predetermined period of use.

So, it seems to me that with DRM, developers are attempting to redefine the term of ownership, and I think this video does a great job of highlighting this phenomenon.

 

[marurder]

So

Seems like a valid comparison to me. You get X product for Y time

So essentially you don't buy a game, you rent it for an amount of time that the producer sees fit and can also revoke.

 

[Doom-Slayer]

Compare real life to piracy: YOU CAN'T DO THAT ITS DIGITAL MEDIA AND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID!
Compare DRM to real life: Yeah that's right, this totally supports my ideas and shows how right I am!

It's a fun little absurdity but by no means anywhere near a valid comparison. Still, it's an interesting idea.

Primarily because everyone brings up "theft" when talking about piracy which is their major flaw, since theft and copyright infringement are 2 different things and you cant accurately have a physical representation of copyright infringement.

However you CAN have an accurate physical representation of DRM. Kind of this, but instead of after X times you sit down, imagine theres someone with their finger on the "break button" and they press it after a few years when they feel like it.

 

[TheComfyChair]

It'd be more comparable if it used up a 'use' per every different person and every person is then allowed to keep sitting on it without using up another use. The sitee can then unregister their ability to sit, and give it to another potential person-who-likes-to-sit-on-a-hard-wooden-chair (that's how securom works with computers).

It's not just a person sitting on it 8 times. I don't remember any game to stop working due to even the worst DRM after a few times of playing it.

But i suppose that's slightly less evil and wouldn't be as sensationalist. Also, the chair wouldn't fall apart, it would just taze the 9th person who sits on it unless one of the previous 8 gave up their registration.

Actually, that would be fun, can we do a more accurate DRM chair please, with the creators of this one as the 9th person or above? DRM is annoying, but people who try to be clever about anologies like this and miss the point in pursuit of sensationalism annoy me, especially when they're probably annoyingly smug about it (performance art, they have to be smug, that's their baseline emotion).

P.S. The always online chair tazes you if your wifi goes down.

 

[Trishbot]

My relationships are like DRM and modern gaming. They expect me to "always be on", they quickly expect me to prove to THEM that I'm the real deal, I end up punching in a bunch of numbers to pay for our dates and entertainment, they're only fun for a limited amount of times before becoming useless, and then they try spying on me. Then when I try to tell them why I'm hooking up with someone else, someone who treats me with respect, they say it was my fault and try and ban me from their lives.

Huh.

 

[Vault101]

Well, with SimCity (And Diablo 3 before the announcment of Console offline version) its the same thing, EA servers have a history of lasting right around 5 years before they kill them, and with the majority of Sim Cities computing done server side, as soon as its turned off you wont have the product you paid for anymore.

I know that, its just limited installs seems so much more....up front about the fact your game has a use by date

I also find it hilarious that consoles are getting a version with offline...showing that "playing it the real way" was bullshit

 

[CJ1145]

The thing I took away from this video is that people don't know how to sit comfortably. They all just ease their asses into the thing and just kind of... hover. You're supposed to plop down and relax damn it!

 

[gigastar]

Are they even still having install limits like they used to when Spore etc. were around?

Most publishers have moved to making people register an account with Steam or some other distribution service in place of limited installs.

For example you cant play the PC version of Borderlands 2 online without signing up to Steam.

 

[verindae]

Has no-one stopped in their fervent anti DRM rants to think that this video is actually poor at describing the problems with DRM? There's a whole bunch of different people using that 1 chair. Translate that into a whole bunch of different people using that 1 game and you have a game getting banned because it's pirated. I do wish people would think more...

I dislike restrictive DRM as much as the next gamer, but I know a bad metaphor when I see one.

 

[Something Amyss]

Compare real life to piracy: YOU CAN'T DO THAT ITS DIGITAL MEDIA AND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID!
Compare DRM to real life: Yeah that's right, this totally supports my ideas and shows how right I am!

It's a fun little absurdity but by no means anywhere near a valid comparison. Still, it's an interesting idea.

It is amusing to see silly, disingenuous and strained analogies, however.