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IDAD 2014 Experiment Results
Instead of making a blog post or YouTube video about defectivebydesign.org's International Day Against DRM, I took an idea jokingly presented by -Gamah, who has recently been frequenting the Jupiter Broadcasting Mumble lobby, to create instead two software programs with seemingly identical functionality, but to have one implement some form of DRM and the other work normally.
As a result, this was born. It tricked users into thinking it was a perfectly good program, but they were confronted with an "error" when they tried to utilize it. The program led one to believe it was attempting to authenticate with some remote server (why this application would need to do that is beyond the scope of the experiment), and it would never be able to. Pressing an available "Give Up" button would have navigated the user here, where they would find out the real reason it didn't work.
The results of the experiment were quite pleasing. Most of the participants found it to be quite clever (as I'd like to think it was), while others never downloaded the executables because they weren't interested in the product they weren't really going to get anyway. I was able to convince some of them, but others were persistent that they didn't want to participate. Their loss.
In the end, the experiment was a success. Some were merely amused at my cleverness, while others who had never heard of DRM were actually made aware of it by this project.
I'll certainly be doing another one next year.
Amendment 1
I never did one the next year. :(