What's reasonable to respond if you don't like digital rights management (DRM), now that the EU Commission is anyway asking? At Exile6e we did a basic answering guide for the consultation here. Please share, remix and re-do and put on your own website! :-) If you want to read the original questions, please find them here, and a very pedagogical tool for making consultation reply documents from Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland can be found here. The future awaits!

To act against DRM redefining what law is and means, and to stop it from becoming a tool for those that don't like competition and innovation, it's probably best to make replies for question 13 and question 73 in the consultation. But DRM touches many different areas of copyright: copy protection is also a topic for questions 32(b), 36(b), 58, 76 och 80.

DRM may not be a problem only because it exists, but it's becoming a problem because DRM increasingly redefines legal norms and make them different from the norms codified in the law. Currently, we are very permissive towards technical and contractual redefinitions of what freedoms and rights users of culture should have, in a way which is more restrictive than mandated by law (be it by internet filtering, copy protection or any other means). In question 73 one can reply that this should not be the case. As a citizen one should have the right to expect that the freedoms and rights defined in law, with regards to how we can socialise and interact, are true and valid. The law must be clear about what rights people have, and which freedoms they have, and we shouldn't hand over important cultural, social and economic freedoms on companies that are strongly incentivised to control our every step!

That manufacturers of DRM are able to control all secondary markets and follow-up markets (or non-markets) has been discussed for a long time. Hal Varian pointed already in 2002 to the large scope granted to chip manufacturers and hardware manufacturers to control competition and innovation in secondary markets through implementing copy protection - not just for copyrighted works but for anything imaginable (printers, video streams, et c). For specifically copyright protected works like films and music DRM now means that libraries, universities and archives cannot freely dispose of academic writings or culture and that they cannot make it accessible to their visitors online. It's primarily in questions 32(b), 36(b) and question 58 where one can answer that this should not be the case.

A new study from Tilburg in the Netherlands suggests that we have different cultures around DRM in the EU and the US. The European legislation encourages technology companies, copyright holders and governments to not restrict legally established freedoms of users, but also both jurisdictions have seemingly poor protection for competition. An older study from Jönköping University in Sweden also suggests that the European legislation presently grants larger opportunities for rightsholders to circumvent the legally established frameworks since there is no obligation to respect such frameworks in technology. European copyright law is not implemented in the same way in all the member states, which creates legal uncertainty. European copyright law also doesn't change very often (or at all), as opposed to American legislation which changes often (this is connected with the right to initiative, which Congress has, but Parliament does not). The Pirate Paryt member Jan Lindgren made a large compilation of cases in 2008 concerning DRM and the hunt for file-sharers. But it also bears remembering that with physical records, we've actually already had case law in Europe for a long time which established that technical protection measures should not rewrite laws for citizens. These arguments can surely be inserted in any question one wishes to tie to DRM.

A very strong factor for DRM becoming a big problem is that we are making intermediares (like internet service providers, Google, Facebook, or what have you) liable for what their users do. This issue is touched in question 76. This legal climate gives platform developers, hardware manufacturers and internet service providers strong incentives to develop technologies that controls users in a way which minimizes the corporate risk of responsibility. This creates centralized and bad systems. I would also suggest that they run entirely contrary to the ideas of an innovative economy and the idea of European cooperation. See for instance the earlier discussions here on EME in HTML5.

Or as EU founding father Robert Schuman said in his declaration of May 9th, 1950: "World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it. /.../ Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity."

At this time, DRM seems to become the single plan which does not work for solidarity, and which does not give concrete results for citizens in terms of friendship, cultural exchange or innovation.