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In an interview with Forbes, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division, said that it is the company's job to provide 'important' DRM while it is up to content providers to decide whether to employ it.

'Certainly the content providers are the people who determine what the rights are,' he said. 'Our view is it's our job to provide the technology and the content providers can tell us what kind of restrictions and policies they want to apply to that.'

Bach was responding to a question about Apple CEO Steve Jobs' recent call

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for the music industry to abandon DRM. That call was met with misgivings by the industry (with the possible exception of EMI), which suggested that if Apple is interested in interoperability then Apple should license its FairPlay DRM technology. Bach agreed.

'They really don't want to license FairPlay, for whatever reason,' he said. 'We don't completely understand that, but OK. We've been very focused on producing a DRM system. We're willing to license it across the board.'

The answer is slightly disingenuous, as Microsoft has developed two DRM systems: one it licenses, the Windows Media-based PlaysForSure, and one it does not and uses to tie its Zune portable media players to the Zune Marketplace music downloads store.

Bach insisted that there is no contradiction, that the market needs both.

'We're going to provide the technology on one hand and the product on the other,' he said.