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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."
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'
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.