[…] your evidence and experience, so please read and consider via Consult . Far more sinister is the Creative Content Online inquiry that includes questions on DRM and multi-territory rights licensing - the EC is infamous for ropey […]

These questions appear to presume that interoperable DRM systems are required at all. Should there not be some debate about the benefits and risks of DRM before focusing on the rationale for interoperable DRM.

I quite agree!

I remain unconvinced that any kind of DRM will become widely accepted by consumers — prohibitive technologies (as opposed to enabling technologies) are never popular, especially when they interfere with consumers’ ability to use material they’ve purchased in ways that are (or are perceived to be) legal.

Absolutely; that’s one of the main problems with the consultation; it seems to assume that DRM is unequivocably a good thing.

Certainly. DRM-infected products should clearly be labelled as such. Interoperability could definitely be improved, though I don’t know how.

In my opinion, EULAs are largely irrelevant. Clickthrough licences offered as unilaterally-imposed contracts have already been defeated as unfair. Indeed, the reason we have consumer contracts legislation is to mediate between the powerful corporations and powerless consumers, relatively speaking, in this regard. Very few people read EULAs and ever fewer take them seriously. It is unrealistic to rely on EULAs to convey important information to consumers and it is unrealistic to rely on provisions within EULAs either to legitimise the removal of fair dealing rights or to inform consumers about technological features affecting their ability to use creative works in ways they might expect to be able.

Most definitely not. Further, more-widespread use of DRM technologies should definitely not be encouraged. It is mainly a dead-end technology, disliked by consumers, ineffective at protecting works from determined users and an impediment to many users’ legitimate uses of creative works.

Encouraging SMEs to use DRM — as opposed to encouraging greater invention and more consumer-friendly business practices — is more likely to hinder SMEs than to help them.

I’m uncertain. Certainly, pan-European consumer protection regulations would be a good thing. Pan-European consumer restrictions, however, would be deeply damanging. The worth to the cosumer of a common strategy across the EU-25 depends entirely on what that strategy is.

Of course, any levelling of the playing-field could only be beneficial to SME content producers and distributors across Europe. That said, most content producers and distributors are multinationals based outside the EU and also trading outside the EU. Any change in European regulations would be of minimal benefit to such companies unless it were agreed at the WIPO level.

It is important to note that any standardisation towards US norms would be particularly consumer-unfriendly.

Not suing consumers would probably be a good start, as would much greater experimentation by content producers and distributors with new business methods and alternatives to copyright, as has been seen by Creative Commons licenced works and the “pay what you like” experiment by Radiohead, for example.

In the absence of large-scale copyright reform, explicit licences, included gratis, enabling consumers with hard-copy purchases to make use of the “rights” perceived as being part of the fair dealing exceptions (perceived “rights” such as format-shifting and parody, for example) might be a good way for content producers and distributors to regain some consumer goodwill, especially from the multinationals most heavily involved in consumer litigation and bad press over the last half-decade.

From a legislative point of view, the implementation of wide-scale copyright reform — in the vein of the recommendations from the UK Treasury’s Gowers Review of Intellectual Property law — is massively overdue.

When copyright restrictions are both unpopular and unrealistic, when they fail to chime with the public’s expectations, it is unsurprising that these laws are treated with contempt by consumers.

Absolutely not!

Removing or restricting someone’s access to the Internet over misuse of part of that acess is deeply excessive a punishment, especially when Internet access is usually shared between several people, not all of whom will generally have misused that access.

Equally, when there are quite so many ISPs in the EU, it would be very difficult to prevent someone simply moving to another ISP or using a friend’s name to register with an ISP.

Finally, ISPs are generally regarded as “dumb conduits of data”, legally speaking, not to be held responsible for data passing through their networks any more than a mail distributor is responsible for hate-mail or than a telecoms provider is responsible for nuisance calls. It is not in the interest of ISPs to threaten, bully, cajole or disconnect their customers, particularly without seeing any financial benefit for doing so.

Acess ot t he Internet is increasingly an essential part of social and civic discourse. Removing such access over an accusation that someone has misused a part of that access would be both disproportionate and draconian.

Filtering measures are a thoroughly imprecise tool that also prevents legitimate use of technology, without solving the proble of illegitimate uses. Plenty of copyright-free and Creative Commons licenced works are also disseminated through filesharing and peer-to-peer networks (for example) and filtering does nothing about more generic network protocols such as websites illegally propagating copyrighted content.

Networking technology is such that it would be trivial to create unfiltering means of filesharing, piggybacking over the HTTP and SSL protocols essential and intrinsic to the Web and e-commerce, for example.

This genie is out of its bottle. There is little point in trying to use ineffective and imprecise technological measures in vain attempts to put it back; they simply don’t — and can’t — work.