In a curious twist to the fight between Microsoft and Apple in the digital device market, Microsoft general counsel and executive vice president Brad Smith told reporters that Apple shouldn't blame the record labels, suggesting that Apple's push to get the labels to drop their desire for DRM restrictions on digital downloads is really an effort to gain more market share for iPod. The implication being that said effort would be coming at the labels' expense.

"I'm not a big believer in just blaming the music industry for Apple's inability to sell every conceivable iPod," said Mr. Smith to reporters in Japan. "I think they're (Apple) doing pretty well from what I can tell. In fact I think the music companies are the ones who right now are doing a little less well."

Mr. Smith is seemingly referring to Apple CEO Steve Jobs's open letter to the music industry calling on the labels to drop DRM restrictions on their digital catalogs. That letter was published in February of 2007, and on April 9th, Apple and EMI announced a landmark deal that would present that label's catalog without DRM on iTunes starting in May.

Mr. Smith said that his company would be interested in a similar deal, but, "At the same time I wouldn't go as far as Steve Jobs did and suggest that everything is the fault of the record labels." What precisely "everything" is, however, he didn't make clear.

The nexus point in all this is may be Mr. Jobs's public position that the labels want DRM controls, have required Apple to include those controls in their licensing agreements, and that Apple can not properly provide those controls if it allows third parties to have access to the keys. Therefore, reasoned Mr. Jobs, the labels would be best served by dropping DRM restrictions in the first place.

It is this position that Mr. Smith appears to take issue with. "I believe that fundamentally people who produce content and who own the rights to that content deserve the opportunity to make their own decisions about how they want to provide that content to the public," he said.

Microsoft itself has long been a proponent of DRM restrictions on software, music, and video, and has done everything it could to accommodate big media in recent years by offering all manner of DRM controls for digital content in Windows XP and Windows Vista. The company's own anti-copying controls for Windows have been considered onerous, and are the strictest in the market.

Indeed, Microsoft executives have waged public campaigns against open source software, and steadfastly promoted intellectual property rights as a cornerstone of innovation in the computer industry. Accordingly, Mr. Smith's comments are in keeping with Microsoft's position on the issue throughout the years, even if his take on Apple seems to lack context.