

Apple Tech Would Stop iPhones From Filming Live Events  - minalecs
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/06/16/new-apple-technology-stops-iphones-from-filming-live-events/

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mikecane
Listen, concerts and live events are the least of it.

What if the cops have this tech installed in their cars and prevent you from
filming them in action?

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misuse-permit
And they're filing a patent?

So let me get this straight. Mr Band holds a venue and pays to install Apple's
patented film-blocking technology. Then, all of the loyal Apple customers who
paid good money for their phones get a feature disabled at the concert.
Meanwhile, Joe who bought a cheap Samsung phone can go on recording the event
because his phone doesn't have some crappy Apple-patented technology in it.

Or is the idea that when I go to a big name concert, they'll confiscate all
the phones that aren't made by Apple?

Either way, the idea, if reported by Fox correctly, is stupid and does not
make any sense.

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BigZaphod
This is only a patent. This is not a feature of a shipping product. Hopefully
it never will be.

Apple patents anything and everything and a ton of them are never really used.
Optimistically, perhaps they grabbed this idea solely to prevent anyone else
from doing it. By having a patent, they can refuse to license the idea to
anyone and go after anyone who tries it anyway. You never know.

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cgranade
While I want to share that optimism, I worry precisely because of Apple's many
flirtations with censorship and their having built an amazing architecture for
such on their iOS platform. This patent, whilst it wouldn't make any marketing
sense or design sense, seems philosophically quite compatible with modern
Apple.

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jentulman
There was an earlier post about this here...
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660794> with a different initial
reporting source. I put a link to the patent that might be concerned in my
comment on that thread.

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teilo
Which means that hardcore bootleggers, as always, will spend their money on
the hardware that works best for them.

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quesera
Which, in this case, would be a quarter-inch square of electrical tape.

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teilo
I wouldn't count on it. Standard CMOS sensors can see infrared, but are
filtered so that they do not. It would not be much of an engineering challenge
to use the CMOS sensor to read an IR data stream while filming.

