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Google Patents Using iPhones To Kill 'Free Bird'
theodp writes "At Chicago's Billy Goat Tavern, construction workers found physical threats an effective way to discourage smart-ass Whitney Young High School students from playing annoying jukebox songs over and over again. But with Google's newly-patented technology for the Collaborative Rejection of Media for Physical Establishments, you no longer need to resort to violence to prevent Elton John Songs from being played on jukeboxes in bars. Its invention, boasts Google, 'enables customers of an establishment to collaboratively reject a media file that is currently playing and/or pending to be played within that establishment by entering data into a personal wireless portable computing device on their person, for example a cellular telephone.' But don't get your hopes up too high, kids. Much like Google's dual-tier stock plan, the patent calls for 'customer status levels including a premium status and a standard status,' so a premium customer will be able to veto attempts by lowly standard customers to kill his requests to play MC Hammer's 'Can't Touch This'. The patent comes from a quirky Outland Research IP portfolio acquired by Google; its inventor is Louis B. Rosenberg, a Stanford PhD and professional film maker."
I would be happy about the premium service, to keep you people from cancelling my music. But, then again, there is no way that any jukebox in any of *your* bars is going to have the kind of music on it that I'm into anyway. And no bar that would let you people in is going to serve the kind of food I eat, or the drinks that I'm into these days. I would tell you about it, but you wouldn't get it. You see, I don't even *own* a TV. And everything you like is just a ripoff of the *real* stuff that only a few people like me know about. Of course, you don't get it. But I wouldn't expect people like you to understand. You should probably stick with your radio music. Doubt you could handle the real stuff anyway.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm taking my custom painted iPad to a club that you haven't heard of, in a part of town that you've probably never been too, to listen to music you wouldn't understand, with people you would never meet. I would say goodbye, but no one says that anymore unless they're being ironic--or do they?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
But don't get your hopes up too high, kids. Much like Google's dual-tier stock plan, the patent calls for 'customer status levels including a premium status and a standard status,' so a premium customer will be able to veto attempts by lowly standard customers to kill his requests to play MC Hammer's 'Can't Touch This'.
I think there's some confusion here. I read that part of the patent as saying that if you, the owner of this jukebox system, have a patron at your place of playing music that is a regular then you can get his/her ID and promote them above random walk-ins. I used to bartend for two years in college. There was this lonely guy that came in everyday of the week. My first day there, the owner pointed at him and said, "This is Joe, you help Joe before any other customers, you charge Joe $1.25 for each of his beers no matter what size or kind, tap or bottle." Apparently for 30 some years that guy came in, drank five beers through the course of the entire evening and left. People like that, I think you'd let them have your way with your jukebox and maybe you, the owner would be above everyone else in case things got out of hand. Maybe google thinks bars will run promotions where the first birthday person in the door with a large party gets veto control over the jukebox? Who knows?
At Chicago's Billy Goat Tavern, construction workers found physical threats an effective way to discourage smart-ass Whitney Young High School students from playing annoying jukebox songs over and over again.
What the hell? Somebody want to fill me in? I just spent ten minutes googling for some news item about this and came up empty handed ...
My work here is dung.
Um, it's called voting. It's ridiculous what absurdly obvious and trivial things can be patented. Well I'll one up them and patent the same thing, but for regulating the temperature of the room.
Better known as 318230.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rqQujx9vk0
The patent office needs to stop awarding idiotic patents. Anything plus a computer/mobile should not equal a patent.
Music is by far the most boring application of this "media banishment system", especially at an exercise club or waiting room.
I would love to see this applied to TV News and the financial news shills and the weather channel. Oh god not another "it bleeds it leads" hit skip. Not another kitten in tree saved by firefighters. The commentator on CNBC right now is a real estate shill .... flushing sound .... Onsight live broadcast breathlessly reporting "its raining" zapped.
The main problem is there's a million recorded songs out there, the bar flies cannot possibly block them all even if they were sober and cooperated. But unleash this on the financial news channels and a small team could literally wipe the slate clean of all stories leaving a blank screen or test pattern. Its very likely that if you zap all the video news releases, and network entertainment news self promotions, and celebrity news, and pointless human interest stories, there is nothing left in a typical newscast.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So what are 17-18 year old at the most students from a high school doing in a tavern? Maybe they should just enforce the existing rules to keep them out of there.
...you no longer need to resort to violence to prevent Elton John Songs from being played on jukeboxes in bars.
There's always been a non-violent resort: have the proprietor remove Elton John discs/records from the jukebox. If the regulars request it, the owner will be happy to make the regular, paying customers happy.
Does the person who's song got voted down get a refund? They paid money to listen to it.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Why is it that everytime an article mentions a "cellular phone", /. editor needs to put the i*** word in the headline ?
Does the person that paid money to play the song get a refund? I'm guessing the owner of the establishment / jukebox could have some policy, visible or not, that says they can interrupt any song for any reason, but still.
Seems there's another issue here besides the jukebox.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
if only one could invent something to prevent people from going to such bars.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
They might but I hope Google doesn't actually plan to enforce trivial patents. The system is so messed up that even if a company doesn't want to patent stupid stuff, they have to just to avoid getting sued later or at the very least have something to throw back when they do get sued over stupid stuff.
People are more than able to caught $20 for the music THEY want to here. The problem with Jukeboxes is that they play all of one customers songs in the order paid for. Some kid dumps $10 for the same song 20 times there's nothing to do about it. There are a lot of other ways to deal with the situation that could be built into the player.. Randomize tracks, only accept 3 songs at a time, only let so many repeats in an hour, etc....
This is a classic Tragedy of the Commons situation. The music affects everybody at the location, but the play rights are sold to one jukebox provider. Once they got the rights, they have no further interest in making user the experience is good for everybody. Free Capitalism baby! If somebody wants to harass the other customers with $20 of MCHammer it's not the jukebox providers problem.. They got their $20! If you didn't like the selection put your own $20 in first. You had the same chance as anybody else... Why did you "share"? It's exactly like the Ferengi Rules of Accusition.
Why do people keep parroting this shit?
Google has said they will never sue over patents and they haven't. It's more so they can protect themselves later and also highlights a complete lack of patent office quality.
King Tut.
i want this in my local Giant as well. Many people go to bars to actually listen to damnboxes, but nobody goes to Gian to listen to their muzak.
Another application of iPhone-based voting: where should the drone fly and where to drop. Like crane game in arcades.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
You don't deserve a music-related patent if you can't spell Zeppelin.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Could we apply this idea to /. stories with misleading summaries or headlines?
Its *called* "U Can't Touch This" and is a tour-de-force, a magnum opus, one of the very pillars in our culture. Damn kids.
(Captcha: disgusts, what U Cant Touch This does to people's ears.)
This is funny, but it's probably an abuse of the patent system. At best it is trivial.
And Vonnegut thought American life was absurd in his heyday. We seem to be living in a Dali painting now....
...that allows certain people, let's call them "moderators," to assign -1 or +1 rating points to the song. If the song falls below the bar's threshold, then it doesn't play. The selector of the song also accumulates these points from the moderators; we can call this "karma." Bad or good karma gives their future song selections a lower or higher initial rating, respectively. I'm so novel and smart! Time for me to file for my patent, beyotches!
Can we focus on some REAL issues!? I have some much simpler suggestions: 1-leave 2-use earplugs 3-battle of the jukebox songs! (Or, I Can Drive You Crazier Faster Than You Can Drive Me Crazier!)
I'm as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot chayayayayayayange!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I have little doubt of prior art on this. I used to work at a company in New Zealand where one could vote a song up via a web interface.
One day one of the owners complained to, if I recall correctly the programmer, Adam, who had written the code for it and handled the tracks, if he could change the music since it most likely was highly disturbing to me, and since I was working on a Perl project from hell (no, not all Perl projects are like that), I needed peace. Then the guy told him that what was currently playing (System of a Down), was my contribution to the jukebox and had just been voted up by me, as well :-).
Aside: the owners of the same company agreed shortly after that I could have a "dual-head". One of the owners went after the meeting to a nearby shop that was selling video carts on the very cheap because of "smoke damage". The secretary handed the card over to me, and told me I now had "dual-head". My question: where's the monitor was met by a blank stare followed by: you needed an extra video card, right? To which Adam replied, "And to what is he going to connect it? To his eyes?". Aaah, those were the days. The company considered itself a player in the IT and ahead of its time, supporting Linux, OSS (but also doing illegal installs of Windows...).
Perl Programmer for hire
FTFS:The patent comes from a quirky Outland Research IP portfolio acquired by Google
In other news: The Onion Spins off R&D Department, Eyes IPO in April 2013
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Is this the generic term for smart phones now?
Sigh, another page hit title.
Google holds a patent to use a __________ branded mobile phone to squash jukebox songs. Last I knew, Google is well known for a certain mobile phone OS.
But no, the title went for "iPhone".
So who paid for that headline?
Folks, THAT is the new business model - "pay for custom slanted news!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Um.. so sorta like Ampache's Democratic Play feature? http://ampache.org/wiki/democratic
I put a dollar in the machine in the hopes that the song I want to listen to won't be vetoed by other people?
why would you want to skip Elton John songs?
I love that song :)
The real problem is that they can if the want to. The patent office needs a hard kick to the butt.
The links are to sites, not to the events or activities described. Who cares about the Billy Goat Tavern, except if one lives within driving distance?
It's entertainment. True journalism doesn't merely suggest being unbiased; it requires it. But today in 2012, 9 out of 10 "news" reports are absolutely biased. Observe the tone of their voice, their body language, their emotions. They pick a side every time, and often they even flaunt it, as if they had never even heard of this fundamental principle of journalism.
The bottom line is that "news" today isn't really news. It's merely commentary, and uneducated commentary at that. It's designed precisely to appeal to the masses, however wrong the masses may be. They appeal to the masses because it sells the most advertising.
Even NPR is going down this same drain. Again, listen to their tone of voice when (for example) conducting interviews. An interviewer is supposed to ask questions. Period. They are supposed to show no emotion, and never pick sides -- that is the job of the interviewee. Yet nearly every time I hear an interview on NPR, it is absolutely clear which "side" the interviewer is on.
There's a chinese restaurant in my town that has the commentary track to "Thriller" in their jukebox, it's become tradition to queue it up 10 times before leaving.
Congress needs to stop taking money away from the patent office.
That's the underlying issue.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Since when has "iPhone" become the generic term for a mobile phone?
Oh, wait, my mistake. It's just another badly thought-out Slashdot headline!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Interestingly, the ID of the parent poster, "GoogleWatch" (2635599), appears to have been created just for this article.
If he can't play "What's New, Pussycat" 21 times in a row, with an "It's Not Unusual" thrown in occasionally.
It all sounds like a pretty good way to get people sitting around getting drunk more interested in doing things like beating the fuck out of and/or shooting/stabbing each other.
If you're running iTunes on a computer, you can enable iTunes DJ (formerly called Party Shuffle). From there, any iPhones on the network with Apple Remote installed can connect to it and vote songs up that they'd like to hear (assuming you enabled the ability to make requests). Granted, it doesn't kill songs that are playing that no one wants to hear, but it's been on shipping devices for several years already.
As for the problem of killing songs no one wants to hear, the better way to handle that is to NOT MAKE THEM AVAILABLE. Seriously, why would a place make songs available that their patrons wouldn't want to hear?
You say fuck, so you must be right, right? Obviously, it's not always possible for prior art to use the same technology... And what are "same methods"?
Perl Programmer for hire
You're talking about a commons (the music being played in public). The most efficient use of a commons is to auction it off: whoever wants the next song most wins.
If the kiddies want to play Elton John over and over, and can afford to bid it up, let 'em. The owner of the place, who is the one who makes the decision about who gets to be in the bar, will be happy to have them paying $25 rather than 25 per song. If he feels badly about the construction workers being driven out, he can use the proceeds to buy them a beer wherever they end up.
There are lots of ways to implement that, including using mobile phones.
Everyone knows that the name of the song is 'U can't touch this'.
Hammer can touch this.
U can't touch this.
I can touch this.
Stop.
Hammer time!
Ya superfreak.
Just kidding. In reality, I store my Zune on top of my jukebox. You know the one. It is sitting right next to my pinball machine. Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
Probably submitter thought it would be hilarious to make the Android fans have a minor freak out over putting "Google" in the same title as "iPhone."
Looks like it worked.
The bird is the word!
back in the old days, we played the entire nine inch nails album broken on a jukebox at a neighborhood pizza hut(!).
it was really amusing to hear "fist fuck" over the speakers at a family restaurant, although not everyone shared our opinion.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
No more Justin Beiber. But a good question to follow up on this is how the media companies, who rely on the income generated by the playing of such music would think of such a system.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
This highlights the age-old question: If you don't want people to play the song, why is it in the jukebox? I've run into this while Rickrolling people in bars. They would glare at me, sometimes even go unplug the jukebox. Then they refused to give me my money back, and were unable to answer my above question. They kicked me out when I started singing it.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
Folks, THAT is the new business model - "pay for custom slanted news!"
Since when is that a NEW business model?
The patent doesn't surprise me at all. I have a friend who seems to derive absurd amounts of satisfaction from annoying random people to the point of anger. I've seen him queue up the same Disney ballad on a jukebox for 12 consecutive plays. Sometimes it works (both in the sense that the song plays the full 12 times, and in the sense that half the patrons have abandoned the place), and other times the song plays only once; eating the rest of the money he spent. The other measure I've seen people take against it is to pipe the jukebox into the PA system, with the volume knob under the bartender's control. I've seen the volume level go from loud enough to prevent conversation to quiet enough to require intent listening over the course of 3 Toxic Holocaust songs.
Folks, THAT is the new business model - "pay for custom slanted news!"
Fox already holds that patent.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Given all the paranoia and accusations of shills around every corner on /. it wouldn't surprise me if this one is a double bluff - someone has created a parody account to either a) troll people successfully, b) genuinely post anti-Google material or c) post anti-Google material in an attempt to make the "shill problem" a bigger one than it really is and lend "evidence" to their cause.
I mean, really? If it's a genuine account with an anti-Google motive then it's about as subtle as a bowling ball in a bag of skittles - hardly an effective propaganda tool, if that's what we're meant to believe it is. It's trying a little *too* hard.
I see two possibilities here,
A) I go to a bar, want to listen to music, but get my music gets rejected. I sure as hell don't want to be at that bar anymore.
B) Or in averaging people's dislikes and likes, the only music that will actually play are songs that no one hates enough to down vote, but no one likes.
It seems like this will piss off new customers, or just ensure no one gets to listen to what they actually really like.
they purposely removed the 'a' so it would be pronounced 'lead' as in the metal, not 'lead' as in leader
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"they can if they want to?" huh? I can sue anyone if I want to, it doesn't mean I'll even make it to court. If I had a patent, I could sue if I want to. That means absolutely zero. People don't function off fear like that. Most technology innovators just simply don't care about patents as highlighted by the oragoogle case.
Patent office does need to get fixed but the "they can sue if they want" when it comes to google isn't even a threat. If you were to make a competing product without resorting to illegal methods, they'd thank you.
Apparently the void or reject button under the bar just wasn't complicated enough.
We're no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I
A full commitment's what I'm thinking of
You wouldn't get this from any other guy
I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling
Gotta make you understand
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
We've know each other for so long
Your heart's been aching
But you're too shy to say it
Inside we both know what's been going on
We know the game and we're gonna play it
And if you ask me how I'm feeling
Don't tell me you're too blind to see
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Find more similar lyrics on http://mp3lyrics.com/ak5
Give you up, give you up
Give you up, give you up
Never gonna give,
Never gonna give, give you up
Never gonna give,
Never gonna give, give you up
We've know each other for so long
Your heart's been aching
But you're too shy to say it
Inside we both know what's been going on
We know the game and we're gonna play it
I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling
Gotta make you understand
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
How lovely when the mob rules. No 1st amendment issue here!
Like most corporations today, the Chocolate Factory has forgotten what our Founders knew was vital to a well-functioning society: Gotta remember the little guy. He may be annoying at times, but lock him in his room just for being a PITA, then who knows when it'll be your turn to enjoy the same?