comScore
Weird Monday, March 4th 2013 at 1:30 pm

Sit on This DRM Chair Eight Times, Then Realize How Stupid DRM Can Be

By ( ) Comments

At its best, digital rights management (DRM) is an inconvenience. At its worst, DRM is a reminder that the companies selling you digital products don’t trust you not to pirate them, and that they’re willing to deliberately, actively make those products worse to keep you from sharing them. DRM is so pervasive in the digital things we buy that we rarely think about it, but what if it bled over into the physical world? Meet the DRM Chair. It’s a chair that only lets you sit in it eight times before it self destructs, and it makes about as much sense as most other forms of DRM I’ve seen.

The DRM chair is the product of The Deconstruction, which calls itself, “a light-hearted competition/game, but it’s really more of a large-scale collaboration between friends, teams, and the public,” on its website. It was made by the team Les Sugus which is comprised of current and former students of the University of Art and Design Lausanne. So what was Les Sugus deconstructing to make the DRM chair? Musical chairs. Obviously.

That makes sense. In theory, several of these chairs could be set out, each programmed to self-destruct after a different number of sittings, thus eliminating one chair automatically every round. Of course, the deconstructed chair parts would be an awful tripping hazard and really up the danger level of the game.

The workings of the DRM chair — like the workings of most chairs, DRM protected or not — are pretty simple. The chair is wired with a switch connected to an arduino board that counts the number of someone takes a seat in the chair. When someone gets up from the chair, a solenoid taps the wood to audibly let you know how many sittings are left. The joints are fused with wax, and in those wax joints are pieces of nichrome wire. When the counter reaches zero, the chair runs electricity through the wire, the wires heat the wax, and the chair goes all to pieces.

You can see a video of the chair in action below:

This design takes the ideas of planned obsolescence to an absurd degree, but it borders on being something that companies could actually get behind. Just imagine if you could experience all the fun of putting together an IKEA chair every fifth time you sat in it!

(The Deconstruction via Hack A Day)

Relevant to your interests

Filed Under | • • • • •
  • Jack Bond

    Because comparing apples to oranges has never steered us wrong before!

  • IceBreaker

    DRM is simply the result of a rich and influential corporate minority dictating the laws to the people.

    DRM has absolutely nothing to do with piracy. A game or an Office Suite that gets tied to a specific PC configuration and will only activate for a small number of times is designed this way to make you pay again and again for the same product. However, when something is on a pay-per-use basis, it is clearly not a product anymore, is it?

    Software has mutated from a product into a utility. Even so, the corporations publishing it refuse to correct the pricing and will still claim the protection the law offers to products.

    They think they can eat their pie and have it too simply because the puppets in Washington care more about their re-election funds than their voters.

  • YetAnotherGeek

    1) The chair needs to be fixed to the floor so that the owner cannot use it in a location not chosen by the vendor.
    2) The chair needs sides so that the owner cannot sit in a way not chosen by the vendor.
    3) The chair needs a lock so that owner cannot allow someone unknown to the vendor to use it.
    4) The lock needs to be a fingerprint lock so that the owner cannot transfer ownership as if they owned it.
    5) There needs to be a remote destruct so that the vendor can decide that they want it back.
    6) There needs to be a way of switching the DRM features off so that chair-thieves are not inconvenienced by any of this.

  • Anonymous

    Imagine anyone could attend a Grateful Dead concert anytime anywhere just be downloading a file to their computer. It would be the actual Grateful Dead in person playing for you and a bunch of other people and it would be free. Anytime. The refreshments would be free too. And the T-shirts. And the smoke. It would all be free. And Jerry Garcia would actually be there because he couldn’t die. So basically the band would be playing non-stop for anybody who wanted to attend the concert. At anytime. That would be wonderful. Except for the band. No one would want to be them. At least not for more than a few days. That’s a world without DRM. without protection for intellectual property. It would be wonderful, except no one would want to be a creator.