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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."
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.
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
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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.
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. ...
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!
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.
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?
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"
If that means that noone else will be able to implement automated censoring without paying a license fee -- I am all for it ;)
The Bill of Rights does NOT protect against censorship by non-government entities. If you are using some Microsoft service, Microsoft has every right to censor whatever you say.
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.
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.
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.
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