Anyone can start a petition regarding anything, but in regards to Akai’s response it’s not as if they’re polluting, selling people’s personal data, or engaging in unethical labor practices. Your pretense that this is not mentioned anywhere and is inconvenient is negated anytime you glaze over something that says “subject to change without notice” which most End License User Agreements have written into the legalese, so if the ELEU has any kind of indication that you are paying for a service which you do not technically own and that the terms are subject to change, they’re strongarming you into agreeing to those terms. That doesn’t mean it’s correct or a good thing for them to do, it just means they have lawyers writing their fine print.
So if you approach them with a petition that says people are unhappy, they aren’t obligated to do anything about it. If you can, however, explore allll the fine print and find a loophole which you can attach your petition to and give it more direction, then you have a better chance of getting something done. Also, if you can do something to show that what they are doing is unethical more than just inconvenient, you may be able to get something done. Also from Akai’s perspective, they’re more likely to recognize a boycott from paying customers than they are a petition of random people, because as I said unfortunately they aren’t obligated to care about people’s feelings. However, if you can prove they are doing something which is in violation of something that, I don’t know, maybe Amnesty international or some other human rights organization would consider a violation, then you can approach it from an angle which they may consider their PR to be at risk and do something.
I doubt Amnesty specifically recognizes plug-ins as a source of discontent in their efforts to right the wrongs of the world, but if you view Akai as not a plug in provider but a company doing business in the world, you need a more solid foundation for the protestation than “I don’t like it”. I’m not criticizing what you’re doing, I’m just trying to give you something along the lines of what it will take to get something done. I already told you, as soon as I read it I didn’t like what they’re doing.
So if you intend to approach it from “this will cost you money because we, the users, won’t stand for it” then you need people who own and pay for akai products and subs.
If you intend to take the stance that “What your company is doing is unethical and here are the facts to back it up, and here are people that agree this is unethical business practice” that is a different kind of petition and it then makes them question whether the threat to their PR is big enough to change it.
I guarantee though, without a shift in one direction or the other, you’ll be wasting any signatures you get because generally only people who feel very strongly will sign the same or similar petition more than once, you just have to make it count while you have momentum. Does that make sense?
