iPad Enemies Speak Out

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We’ve known about the iPad for less than 24 hours, but that hasn’t stopped people from speaking out against it. I’m not talking about people who want to know why it can’t multitask or why it doesn’t have widescreen, or why people got so excited over a 10-inch iPod Touch – some out there have much deeper reason to hate the new tablet from Cupertino.

While most of the tech community was giddy with excitement yesterday (including inside the TFTS war room where we covered), Ars Technica covered that a small protest was going on outside the Yerba Buena Center to protest Apple’s closed software platform and favor of DRM. Protesters handed out fliers that mimicked the Apple invitation for the event but instead said “Come see our latest restriction,” while they held signs that said “Entering Apple Restriction Zone”.

The protesters all were organized by the Free Software Foundation and they had four talking points for why they didn’t like the iPad – #1 – no free software, #2 – No installing apps from the Web, #3 – No sharing music or books, #4 -  Apple can remotely disable purchased content from the cloud.

John Sullivan, the FSF operations manager who was leading the protest, said they wanted to petition Steve Jobs personally to ask him to remove all DRM from the iPad. Of course, it’s not Jobs who added DRM – it’s at the behest of the book and music publishers, and what good is a music or bookstore with no publishers? At any rate, seven protesters showed up to protest Apple’s latest ‘restriction” and Sullivan thought it had gone well.

Remember that great iBooks UI they showed off on the device? That’s very similar to a program sold on the Mac called Delicious Monster. Delicious Monster was a program for cataloging your book collection and looked very similar. According to co-founder Wil Shipley, Apple hired away most of his team to work at Apple, and then the iPad blatantly rips off their UI design for the stored books.

No word on if Shipley will press legal action (he probably won’t). The FSF told Ars Technica’s reporters that they planned to protest Apple Stores the day the iPad is released, so it doesn’t end here.