People are seeing Digital Restrictions Management for what it is this week, thanks to Apple's "Fairplay" DRM scheme.

People sometimes think of DRM as solely a means to prevent copying, but the fact is that it directly obstructs other legitimate work, Apple's recent update to the QuickTime media framework in Mac OS X is doing much more than enabling DRM-laden movie rentals in iTunes -- it also disables crucial features in video-editing software. Attempting to export from many applications after the update results in a DRM permissions error. Worse yet, it is not possible to roll back to a previous version of QuickTime without doing a full operating system reinstall. The supposed system upgrades are actually preventing people from exporting their own video.

Apple's discussion forums are being heavily moderated on this issue, with many complaints being removed completely. By forcing DRM at an operating system level, Apple has made Mac OS X defective by design. Fortunately there are alternatives. Dynebolic is a GNU/Linux distribution that is focused on video editing while respecting your freedom. Dynebolic is completely free software, and because of this, its users will never wake up one morning and find their computers crippled.

We encourage everyone affected by Apple deliberately breaking their computers to express their displeasure to Tim Cook directly, both by emailing him <tcook@apple.com> and by moving to a different operating system -- one that respects the freedom of its users.