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Pour out the pack of mater to mine ears, the good and the bad together....(Anthony and Cleopatra -Act2)

Microsoft defends its digital rights management in new Vista operating system.

It is reported that Vista would "downgrade" the quality of all video and audio, if they were not output via approved connections on the PC.

Microsoft said the quality of "premium content" would be lowered, and only if requested by copyright .

The measures are in place, says the firm, to protect content such as high definition movies from being copied.

Vista's copy protection systems have come under fire from from Peter Gutmann, a computer science lecturer at the University of Auckland.

He said Vista was "broken by design" and intentionally crippled the way it displayed video.

"The sheer obnoxiousness of Vista's content protection may end up being the biggest incentive to piracy yet created," he wrote.

In a response to the paper, Dave Marsh, lead program manager for video at Microsoft, said many of the copy protection systems enforced by Vista were common on all playback devices.

He said Vista did have the capability of downgrading video and audio quality, like other devices, but that it would only be activated "when required by the policy associated with the content being played".

The copyright holders of content on HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs, for example, can insist that the video be played back in high definition only if it is output via a connection that supports the HDCP protection system on a PC and a TV or monitor.

That could prove a problem for many PC users whose graphics cards have a DVI or component video connection which do not support HDCP.

Microsoft said that if picture quality was degraded it would still be better than current DVD quality.

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