Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Seeking to Patent Automatic Censorship
theodp writes "Microsoft is back at the USPTO, this time seeking a patent for the automatic censorship of audio data for broadcast, a system and method for automatically altering audio to prevent undesired words and phrases from being understandable to a listener as originally uttered."
Now if only Slashdot woild only patent all variants of the "First Post" s the ACs would fear lawsuits for posting them.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
I ____ _____ that Microsoft would _____ ____ customers and _________ something like ______ ________!!!
This sounds like a good thing to me. Maybe we can help protect our freedoms by patenting the technologies that try to limit them.
Radios have stopped playing the runaway hit by the Naval Boys, "Ship Funk", as half of the song was now inexplicably silence.
Sounds like it will be used primarily for Xbox Live to make sure 9 year olds don't get cussed out by some pissed off gamers. Sounds like it'll be a feature most consumers will welcome.
This sounds a lot more novel than most of the other patents they get that tend to get highlighted on Slashdot. Is it totally novel? Well, I can't speak for any of the experts out there, but at least it's not blaringly obvious, commoditized technology.
FoxNews already has prior art on that.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
...no more talking about Linux on the radio, eh?
Grundes!
I think someone already invented this a while back. They're called "highway overpasses."
http://www.aaplblog.com/ - News about Apple Inc.
Like "Freedom of Speech" and "Freedom of the Press".
Move Along, Patriot, nothing to see here.
For geeks writting OSS this is absolutely harmless... in fact i can see this being a good thing. If they're the only company allowed to use super cookies and have auto-censorship then the world is a better place :D
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Blue screen of "Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits."
What kind of fucked-up parent lets their 9 year old play XBox Live in the first place?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The rest of the world will do what Battlestar Galactice does: Made up swear words. BSG can't drop the F-bomb much for administrative/ratings reasons, so they use the word "Frak". I could see a lot of new swear words popping up if this happens.
I doubt that the USPTO will bat this down, but there's prior art on all sorts of speech recognition. This one just happens to deal with censorship and adding metadata to the audio stream based on that.
As you all can see though this patent was filed back in 2004, so it's been around for a while. The idea isn't anything new, nor is the application. What would be interesting is the broadcast industry's response to this thing.
grep -ir fuck * on the Linux kernel sources and you'll soon find that Linux is "objectionable material". Now all we need is some bible-belter congressman to push this technology and we're going to have a few issues.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
surely the idea of doing that is, well, "obvious" to just about anyone. There might be particular ways of doing it that might be patentable, but just matching for sounds is exactly what a worried mother does when she puts her hands over her precious son's ears. Training a computer to do the same thing seems an obvious thing to do if it's outputting sound and you don't want people to hear 'bad words'
I forsee a future where you cannot criticize Microsoft in podcasts created and streamed using Windows. "Microsoft Sucks", could be considered offensive.
hey now, if they'll just allow us to define what is worth censoring i'm all for this technology but the choice should be made in the home, not in washington.
the first thing i'd put on an explicitive list: commercials
A few years ago _ _ I was having my dinner, I thought of this very same idea. Instead of c _ _ _inuing to eat, I should have put down my _ _ _ _ and got a sh _ _ _ of paper to write the idea down. Oh well, I _ _ _'_ do anything abou_ _ _ now. I got another great idea but this time my _ _ _ _ _ out of ink. ...
With the number of false triggers one can expect, the default operating mode for such censoring is just going to be "off".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Let us take a fine example from the wonderful lore of Douglas Adams and simply replace every one of our cuss words with the galaxy's worst word: Belgium.
Belgium to those Belgiuming Belgiumers who censor our every Belgiuming word!
www.tvguardian.com. I didn't look at the patent app, but seems like this "prior art" already exists and is patented.
Cingular, Sprint, Verizon are in trouble if MS get the patent, and if MS think the wireless phonce call is "broadcast".
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
How can they patent 'beep' !!!
Automatically detecting the word !@#$ and bleeping it out doesn't seem to be like a bad feature to me, as long as its optional. Maybe it's dumb that they're trying to patent it, but the idea isn't a bad one.
"Censorship is the control of speech and other forms of human expression, it is often (but not necessarily) controlled by government intervention. The visible motive of censorship is often to stabilize or improve the society that the government would have control over. It is most commonly applied to acts that occur in public circumstances, and most formally involves the suppression of ideas by criminalizing or regulating expression." So what is going to happen to all the website that transmit or retransmit audio and/or video ( with http://www.phooty.com/ currently my favorite )?
Why should I need that? I should be able to say whatever f---ing s--- I want too. Any A--hole who says otherwise can suck my d---.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
As some of the posters rightfully noted, this won't solve the problem. One of the symptoms of not solving would be "invented" cursive words. The problem lies deeper.
Think for a minute, why do we curse? We curse to express our emotions. Instead of using words that describe the emotion exactly, like: "I am very angry right now", we spit expletives. We do that to alleviate the anger (for example) caused by this situation. Emotiones expressed in this way help quickly release the pain caused by the anger. But.
But they do not remove the cause of the anger. Bad driver manners will continue, and there is little you could do about that whether with anger or without it.
So what would be a healthier reaction? Right. Anger management. You will train yourself not to react angrily, by channelling anger into correct actions, not emotions.
This is what we have to teach our kids spending on that much more effort than protecting them from hearing infamous seven words.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
--- Do you believe in the day?
I think this COULD be a great idea, myself. This technology could be built into televisions. Then broadcasters could broadcast uncensored versions of the audio feed and it'd be up to the television owner if they want to bleep those words or not. As it should be.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
They are already beta-testing it. Example right here
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Can you imagine the spin off technology? Instead of just censoring peoples speech you could alter it to say politically correct things. Imagine someone speaking in public and the system automatically changing their speech from one that makes the oil companies look bad to one that extols the oil companies virtues in the on going oil crisis. No one gets to hear the actual speech the person intended to deliver. Talk about being able to spin something before anyone gets to hear the damaging speech.
I know most of the replies here are thinking about this in terms of curse words. But the first thing I jump to is the issue of censorship in China. We already know that the search results are filtered over there (see Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). Seems like the next logical step.
As far as I can tell, this would be pretty tough tech to roll out. You'd have to cover all sorts of pitches, tones, garbled speech, and some weirdly pronounced words. So, I'm thinking Microsoft is just trying to get the trophy before the game even starts.
And besides, isn't automatic broadcast censorship just called "Interns?"
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
This actually sounds like a great idea if they could successfully apply it to Xbox Live. It's not like it doesn't happen already online in chat rooms and MMOs. I think there's an obvious fear that this would fall into the government's hands though, especially if they can play well-synthesized voice in place of something objectionable and do it transparently. Fortunately I don't think it's going to happen for a few more years.
If you can bleep a bad word automatically, you can detect it automatically. If you can detect a bad word automatically, you can detect a word like "democracy" or "ACLU" automatically. If you can detect them automatically and have access to the telephone network, you can grep all phone calls for them.
Good thing /. doesn't censor.
Comedienne Elayne Boosler pointed out that all the old crash-words have been worn out from overuse and they just don't provide any relief when you hit your thumb with a hammer.
She suggested reusing some existing words that still have an emotional punch. Someone cuts you off in traffic? Roll down the window and yell, with your face red, "Audit you!".
Wow, I didn't think it would be possible to bring together so many things that Slashdot readers love to hate into one single post, but this article has almost done it:
...
- Microsoft
- Software Patents
- Censorship
Now, if only Microsoft could extend or apply this patent to automatically censor the topics "evolution" and "open source"
Why do they even bother? This is the STUPIDEST THING SINCE W2K! If something is dumb, is worth patenting, and can do major damage to freedom of speech, M$ will do it! Somebody hunt down Mr. Gates and knock some sense into him
This seems just like those filters on online forums that replace bad words that users post with "****". As of yet, it doesn't seem that Microsoft is actually going to be able to use this to censor negative comments about Microsoft over the radio/podcasts/etc.
I mean, they have the capability to censor text but you don't see them replacing all of the "windows sucks" comments on slashdot with "*****".
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I welcome the automatic banning of swear words in broadcast. Try it and see how swear words mutate and evolve so quickly. The swear-words we've got are tried and tested and even the six-year-olds know them. Let's enjoy the fun when swear words evolve more quickly than Microsoft's inevitably crap software.......
If that means that noone else will be able to implement automated censoring without paying a license fee -- I am all for it ;)
This is awarded for taglines for the news postings that actually manage to be thoughtful. A tagline that is witty, appropriate and insightful. That doesn't happen nearly enough and therefore the TotDA will not necessarily appear on a daily basis (despite the name).
I'm assuming that the Tom-Petty-Free-Playlists would be refering to the Last DJ, who plays what he wants to play. Not that that wasn't prescient - I can barely listen to the radio these days and find a real DJ. Internet radio is much better in that respect.
I should stick this in a Journal but I've written this here now. Bother. Oh well.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
..like someone who uses the same damn noun to often. Karma is for people with insight
Anyone else picture the scene where they are at the drive through and Wayne and Garth skip every couple of words while continuing to move their mouths but not say anything?
That's exactly what the patent sounds like, would broadcasters already have prior art though? seeing as how they censor every naughty word already.
Just a note. :)
Smeg is actually an abreviation of smegma. Otherwise known as dick cheese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smegma
a Beowulf cluster of Ponies killing Linux in Soviet Russia, financed by Theo de Raadt!
It's a patent, not a law.
Every patent granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office has force vested in it by the Congress of the United States. It's like a law with a 20 year sunset stating that no person may without authorization make, use, offer for sale, or sell a good or service that matches even one of the patent's claims.
I bet they won't play this song on streaming audio
I bet you they won't play this new #$%& song
It's not that it's #$%& or #$%& controversial
Just that the #$%&ing words are awfully strong
You can't say #$%& on streaming audio
Or #$%& or #$%& or #$%&,
You can't even say I'd like to #$%& you one day
Unless you're a doctor with a very large #$%&
So I bet you they won't play this song on streaming audio
I bet you they daren't #$%&ing well programme it
I bet you their #$%&ing old audio censors
Will think it's a load of horse #$%&
Karma: Chameleon (comes and goes)
This seems just like those filters on online forums that replace bad words that users post with "****".
However, it's much more difficult to recognize and replace banned words in handwriting or speech, and if a Microsoft researcher has discovered a novel and efficient method of doing this, then the company may deserve a patent.
Your not allowed to post/share benchmarks for any product they produce. Free speech be damned.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
What I'd like to see on patent applications: "Provide 5 pertinent, hypothetical examples of the most dissimilar works that would, in applicant's eyes, constitute infringement if produced by another entity. Provide 5 more examples - as similar as possible to the work for which patent is sought - but which would *not* be deemed infringing by applicant. Cross join & explain the variance."
That might gum up the works pretty good. Would make it a bit more difficult to own some facet of of everyday web life as a "technology" or "business process," or at least to legally bully someone else with a broad definition of one's IP? <hmmmm.....>
Pi Ran Out
Tinfoil hats off please, this is for Speech and Media Encorder Services...
So an employee or customer using realtime voice services could use an automated service and the company using MS Speech Server technologies could tell the system to not let them broadcast 4 letter words through the service for example.
Imagine a phone system service that allowed a customer to send messages to friends or family, and lets say the company was Apple using the product, they could use the MS technology to ensure the customer didn't tell everyone the service targeted to go get F**ked...
Another example would be a live broadcast that is encoding to Windows Media going out over the FCC air or the Internet, this could keep a bad caller on 'radio' show (for example) from violating FCC rules in realtime.
It could also be used for parents to censor TV or Audio off the Internet or Via a TV Box so they could limit certain words from their kids.
Get it?
As for 'censorship', come on lets pretend the easter bunny is trying to take over the world with toxic chocolate eggs or something more exciting.
I bet you they won't play this song here at Microsoft
I bet you they won't play this new ____ing song
It's not that it's ____ or ____ ___ controversial,
it's just that the ____ing words are awefully strong.
You can't say ____ here at Microsoft.
Or ____ or _____ or _____.
You can't even say I'd like to ____ you some day,
unless you're a doctor with a very large ____!
So I bet you they won't play this song here at Microsoft
I bet you they won't ____ing well program it.
I bet you their ____ing old program directors,
will think it's a load of horse ____.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Censorship and patents in the same story? Wow... like a disaster gone bad...
This story is the ultimate slashdot flamebait.
so low. i wonder when microjunk will stop focusing on such worthless desires such as media and other topics and focus on the one thing that got them here...(besides hefty marketing)..PROGRAMMING A "SUPERIOR" OS!! ...maybe they realize they suck after all these decades :)
"In the kingdom where everything dies, the sky is mortal."
Personally, I want to know exactly HOW they are doing this. Speech recognition is not in a very good state right now, and I'd love to see it explained in the patent:
1) How they will accomplish this exactly - I want algorithms
2) How they intend to catch EVERY swear word (even if it's limited to the 7 dirty words)
3) How they will prevent false positives in 100% of situations (funky)
If they can't supply those three things, it's not an invention that works as advertised, and shouldn't be granted no matter what you think of software patents. If they get the patent without those three things (or at least the first 2), then it just shows that they are patenting ideas and not inventions. I'd actually be impressed if they could do all three of those things. If they get the patent without those three things, and admit their invention is imperfect (or rather that they've invented something to do a job half-assed) then a better method of auto-censoring audio should be able to come along and be patentable as well.
I think this pretty much outlines the broad scope that patents are being given in the USPTO - they will most likely get this patent, and it will show that the USPTO is patenting ideas because it doesn't know any better.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Microsoft plans to use this technology to censor out these highly offensive words:
Apple
iPod
Google
Firefox
Opera
Mac OS X
Linux
Open Source
-- n
Why we even bother censoring swearing is beyond me anyways. It's not like you don't hear it in real life, so why not on the TV? The only thing that bugs me more (aside from sex being taboo where unrealistic violence is a-ok) is the blurring of unpaidfor product placement to stop free advertising. Well, that and if one is to say "God damn it" on TV, it's not "damn" that's censored - the actual swear - but "God". And why can we say "ass" but not "asshole"?
It's all a load of f'ing bullshit! But on TV, it's a load of annoying crap.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Don't complain. If MS patents this, it means MS controls the ability to do this with a license you'll have to pay to use. In other words, people will be less inclined to actually USE any kind of automatic censorship methods since they'd have to pay MS to do it.
Quit pseudo-block-quoting your own reply.
Not only does it look dumb, the going standard is that the form you use (a lame form of blockquote) implies a -quote-, not something that you yourself are saying. Not only are you misusing the tag, you're misusing the context under which that layout should be used in the first place.
Now if only someone would invent a way to do exactly the opposite so we could find out what the lyrics really are to Louie Louie!
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
...that FBI or NSA got that patent several years ago...
Smurfs have prior art on that.
"Oh, that little Smurfer."
"Quit Smurfing around."
Of course when you think about it, what does that say about Smurfette's name?
Sh!t, there's going to be a lot of bl@@dy beeps in the land of OZ
You never catch me alive
But do we really need this? My generation grew up with excessive swearing almost built-into us, from the age of 5 I knew all the four-letter words (including cunt) but chose not to use them only because my teacher thought they were bad and thus I would be punished for using them.
Today their part of how I talk, a baseline sort of grumbling if I'm not doing anything like: 'Hmm this fucking piece of code, whichever cuntskid wrote this crappy thing.. hmm.. Ohh milliseconds, bugger!'
Like me, and a lot of other people, swear words are only offencive to some other people and are part of our culture and language; if we need to insult people tone of voice, facial expressions/body language and grammar play a much bigger part.
Bad words have been getting less and less offencive over the decades, with new ones being invented to take their place... If I wan't to tell a client 'THIS WEB DESIGN IS THE DOGS FUCKING BOLLOCKS', I shouldn't have my phone system remove any meaning from the expression.
Bah!
yeah they cant even run a simple spell check on the fucking thing to spell address correctly
I'm all for bad patents on bad ideas, because it will make it harder for other people to actually use the bad idea.
Of course, maybe the EFF should take notice and preemptively patent some of the f*cked up, obvious things people are going to misapply technology to over the next years.
Maybe this is one more small step to world domination.. Next they slowly censor more and more words until people are incapable of advanced though... No wait that was George Orwell's Idea with NewSpeak. Could make the transition easier for us though, we won't even notice until it's too late, and then we'll not be able to express the outrage that we feel.
There could be a silver lining to this patent. If its patented it will make it harder to censor things so could be helpful to free speech.
I do not see how this is supposed to be an invention. It is not an invention, it is an just an application. It does not advance the state of the art. The USPTO would be completely incompetent if it would award a patent for this.
Oh wait...
http://www.cursefreetv.com/
Actually this technology already exists. But i have a few points why i dont wanna show off where and what.
:)
first of all i want em to spend money on the patent... second of all i can proof then that they didnt research for prior art and second of it i will maybe sue em for theft and money loss.
for the money loss estimation i am going to use the same people that work for riaa and co... guess it will be in the billion range
_ ______ _____ ____ __ a ___ idea.
But ____, Microsoft ___ _____ ____ my best of friends.
In fact, __ ___ _____ ____ a friend. *sigh*
I dunno.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Why limit this to swear words? See Carl Sagan's "Contact" in the original version, where the richest man in the world got that way by first inventing a box that would detect and censor commercials, and then expanding to detecting 'insincere' speech -- thus shutting off advertising, many televangelists, and almost all politicians....
Patents have to be novel, and non-obvious
Who remembers playing multiplayer worms? if you used a "Dirty" word on the chat, it would get changed to something less offensive. I would concider that a broadcast, and moving from text to speech is IMHO pretty d*** obvious
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
You aren't so muckin' fuch. Why don't you go in your jack yard and back off?
Censor THAT!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Like, "That technology is a futhermucking, dot-gamm shiesse of pit, SIR!"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
If only we could get Microsoft to patent stupidity. I would even help fund the effort and it's enforcement by siccing their lawyers on any luser who exhibited stupidity without the proper license agreement with Microsoft.
<expletive deleted> Microsoft! I hope they eat <expletive deleted> and die. What a bunch of <expletive deleted>suckers. Mother<expletive deleted>s.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Everyone has two "methods for automatically altering audio to prevent undesired words and phrases from being understandable to a listener as originally uttered."
They're called "Getting Old" and "Getting Married".
Reduce, reuse, cycle
One does question, however, why it is even necessary to have such scenes if it doesn't add to the plot of the game (especially the sex-counter part).
Really, the harder it is to implement succesfully one of those, the better. So, hurray MS, go ahead and make yet another poor PR move and save us all on the other side of the wall from having to suffer this kind of crap.
NO SIG
Sex creates people, violence eliminates them.
We have way too many people on this planet.
Which would you ban?
Initiative, Norfolk (pronounced by someone from Norfolk, VA), shiitake mushrooms, Shih Tzu dogs, Mike Hunt. The list goes on an on.
Oh sure, you have to have to have the maturity level of a fourth grader to notice these things and/or find them funny. I'm happy to help!
"Long time listener, first time caller."
Bob Dylan...
But do we really need this?
I am one that growing up we were taught to be polite, but my parents made a big distinction of 'words' and actions or thoughts.
However, there is a need for this in the business world, like in the example I gave, it would offend others and limit the 'creative' services like sending ECards from your company employees by them just leaving their 'best wishes' by picking up a phone. So the company might want to ensure their employees aren't doing the Serial Mom thing and not have to screen all the calls manually.
The other important thing here is the use of Digital media encoding in Radio and television broadcasts. Instead of using a 15 sec delay, features like this could help keep companies that have rules from the FCC out of trouble.
Besides, if there are anal parents that want to limit the words 'juicy c**t' from a movie they wouldn't mind their kid to see otherwise, hey this is actually giving the consumers more power.
As for MS patent on this, it is like the majority of their patents from their last couple of years of patent drives. They were sick of suits from Eola and others, and what they can patent and protect of theirs will help to stop a lot of this.
(If MS ever uses these patents to start stupid lawsuits, I will be one of the first to fly to seattle with my pitchfork.)
That won't work, microsoft just wouldn't make a good swearword. It's too long and wimpy sounding. Bessides, it's just too dirty, and not in the right way.
Now, sco on the other hand, now that would make a good swear word. It sounds like one, it's short, it's got a k(although it is unaspirated), and that k can be made into an ejective to make it sound even worse.
Mod this "Insightful", not "Funny"! I was about to explain what this post demonstrated!
I guess Microsoft's "invention" still needs re____toring.