According to Cory Doctorow (who was of course listening to this presentation, since he was next on the podium) the licence fee is not intended to recoup the expenses Microsoft incurred in developing its DRM, or to turn a profit.

"The intention is to reduce the number of licensors to a manageable level, to lock out 'hobbyists', and other entities that Microsoft does not want to have to trouble itself with," wrote Doctorow on his blog.

I guarantee that this strategy will not 'enable a simple connected digital lifestyle' any time soon, since it deliberately locks out all of the true innovators - the open source authors and the small coding shops that cannot afford a licence fee, but just want to do something cool with media.

Not that DRM works anyway. In Doctorow's own speech he quoted an interesting statistic. It takes on average 180 seconds for an iTunes track (DRM-enabled naturally) to appear in unprotected form on the peer-to-peer networks.

Yep. DRM works all right.