Hot on the heels of Microsoft's deal with Universal Music (a unit of Vivendi) to pay a US$1 royalty on every Zune player sold in exchange for licensing its recordings for Microsoft's new digital music service, Hollywood now wants in on the action.

Why in the world would Microsoft agree to such a dangerous precedent? The obvious reason is that MS needed to get access to the Universal catalog. My favorite (and more dastardly) reason comes from Macalope who claims that Microsoft did it "to try to screw up Apple's business model."

Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.