The European Commission has published a communication on the management of copyright and related rights. While the most interesting parts of the document are about the legal framework for collecting societies, it also includes some statements about digital rights management. One of the central statements may be found on page 10:
"Arguably, the widespread deployment of DRMs as a mode of fair compensation may eventually
render existing remuneration schemes (such as levies to compensate for private copies) redundant,
thereby justifying their phasing down or even out. At the same time, in their present status of
implementation, DRMs do not present a policy solution for ensuring the appropriate balance between
the interests involved, be they the interests of the authors and other rightholders or those of legitimate
users, consumers and other third parties involved (libraries, service providers, content creators...) as
DRM systems are not in themselves an alternative to copyright policy in setting the parameters either
in respect of copyright protection or the exceptions and limitations that are traditionally applied by
the legislature."
To me, this statement seems a little bit more critical towards DRM than other public statements of the European Commission on this topic (although such statements often come from different Directorates-General with different perspectives). The statement also points to the most-debated issue in the current European DRM debate: should statutory levy systems, which have existed in many European countries for decades, be abolished in favor of DRM systems? It is interesting to note that many scholars in the U.S. (including Terry Fisher, Neil Netanel and Larry Lessig) are pushing in the exact opposite direction. Another interesting issue the Commission raises in regards to DRM is the unresolved interoperability problems between different DRM systems.