There is a consistent volume of criticism related to the Digital Rights Management in Windows Vista. And Microsoft is crucified over and over again because it has introduced DRM in Vista. The latest take on the matter comes from Bruce Schneier: "Microsoft put all those functionality-crippling features into Vista because it wants to own the entertainment industry."

Microsoft wants to own the entertainment industry? Right... this makes sense. 100%. Microsoft including DRM in Windows Vista is an evil scheme to control the entertainment industry, and the world! And Bill Gates, believe it or not is currently planning to attack Antarctica in his quest for world domination...

Schneier at one point says: "Certain high-quality output paths -- audio and video -- are reserved for protected peripheral devices. Sometimes output quality is artificially degraded; sometimes output is prevented entirely. And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you're doing something that it thinks you shouldn't. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don't know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn't look good."

While Schneier is at a lost of "details" for this, the fact is that DRM is nothing new. Computers and devices running non-Windows operating systems and standalone consumer electronics, just your average DVD, Blu-Ray and HDVD players have content policies associated with them. And in Vista's case the content policies are not associated with the operating system as a whole but with the playback devices.

The fact that DRM is not a valid protection method for commercial content, the fact that it has failed to prevent piracy, the fact that it has been cracked are all arguments for discarding it. But DRM is controlled at the level of the entertainment industry, and Microsoft has simply chosen to support commercial content scenarios.