Microsoft has been granted a

Microsoft has been granted a patent on a "Digital Rights Management Operating System," which "protects rights-managed data, such as downloaded content, from access by untrusted programs while the data is loaded into memory or on a page file as a result of the execution of a trusted application that accesses the memory. To protect the rights-managed data resident in memory, the digital rights management operating system refuses to load an untrusted program into memory while the trusted application is executing or removes the data from memory before loading the untrusted program." On the plus-side, the patent means that other vendors (i.e., Apple) won't be able to cripple their software with this kind of bad science without paying licensing fees. It's a mixed blessing, all right.LinkDiscuss (via /.)