The legal fallout if Coca Cola claimed rat poison as GRAS would be nothing less of major incident. The expert panel that they are required to hire would likely go to jail on fraud. The documents to the FDA would be proof of intentional deceit, basically guaranteeing that who ever submitted it will get the harshest punishment available to the court. All of it would be enough of a deterrent that companies only do this for the most critical company secrets which they are 100% sure is safe, and everything else can be inspected by the FDA. A pragmatical and reasonable method to make life critical products as safe as possible.
However the major part of Coca Cola (and its flavour) is in the recipe - the technical process that yields final product, not the chemical composition of the ingredients.
I don't have a reference handy, but I am going to present you with an analogy for french fries. I hope you can understand my point from that case (which is even more illustrative of the phenomena I am trying to highlight).
http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-h...
There are plenty of fields where the Car Companies can compete - and software quality should absolutely be one of them. Therefore killing DRM does everybody a favor.
Check your coke can. Look for the word "flavor". That's not an ingredient. That's their secret recipe stuff. They don't have to disclose it on the label. They can make a "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) determination in-house and exempt themselves from disclosure of a trade secret. These are often submitted to the FDA for approval, but not always. If the substance can be determined as gras based on publicly-available information they need not submit to the FDA. It's all about allowing companies to keep their trade secrets ... which is very much similar to the situation with vehicle electronics.