Sorry but this actually isn't as bad the article wants you to believe. First off, they base the whole thing off a Mashable article which is just a hyperbolic paraphrasing of the patent filing meant to attract eyeballs and enrage those who are blindly and without question ant-copyright no matter what. And this author took the bait.
This technology may be used for this purpose but I doubt it will be any time soon. Patent filings are incredibly vague often times and a system that detects how many people are in front of a box doesn't necessarily have to be used to prevent people from watching movies with their friends even if it can.
This article just seems like catnip for people who want go off about how dumb the copyright industry is and how much they hate copyright in general. The copyright system may be fucked and it'd be hard to argue otherwise but in this case, in the context of this article let's just take off the tinfoil hats and slow down here.
Good comment! Although it seems like it MAY have that application, the facts seem to be conveniently parsed.
That being said, after trying to watch some football on the internet today and being told I need a cable subscription, it seems like the more people try to prevent piracy, or in this case just legally not paying subscription fees, the more it pushes people towards it. Or worse yet (for medial companies), people decide that it's not worth the effort or even pirating it, and decide to just do something else, as I did. Sure, some people would be encouraged to buy cable, but some it certainly just hardens their resolve not to pay for the crap they put on TV.
I like sports, but I'm not paying for 90% Honey Boo Boo and America's Top Model to watch the 10% football and other worthwhile content that they have on!
Write software, play a musical instrument, have your kids act out a scene from Shakespeare after dinner. Seriously...unending consumption of entertainment, even when it is infotainment (and maybe that's actually worse) is not beneficial to culture, or to you.
Hmm. Sounds like great technology - but how exactly are they going to tell that your Kinect is pointing at the same room in which people are watching video, as opposed to, say:
1) A towel draped over the aforementioned Kinect?
2) The wall?
3) The hallway outside the room where the movie is being played?
4) Exactly half of the room, with the people who would bring your movie to an Unauthorised Number Of Viewers sat in the other half?
They would require you to set up authorized viewer's faces beforehand I imagine.
I see this as being years away at best though. They would have to build infrastruture around the movie delivery system for it to work - you'd have to register viewers faces and demand they set up the room correctly(well lit?), and of course, people would have to be cool with paying for that overhead. A competing service could easily continue doing things the way they do today, and thus get more customers, more money, and in turn pay content companies more. If it makes content companies more money, then I don't see them adopting the facial recognition model.
I get tired of these screeds. If you're so upset by restrictions, etc, stop consuming Big Content. Otherwise admit the basic fact in play: those companies have such a captive audience because everyone wants their content so bad that they can get away with sorts of crap and people will put up with it. Copyright isn't to blame here. You see the same thing in other industries where branding is paramount (think LV bags).
This is a dumb article, but definitely not for the reason you give. This is a patent for a theoretical way of enforcing a license that doesn't exist. Today, you'd have to have the kinect somehow measure a threshold for a poorly defined "public" performance and report you and find someone willing to sue over it and find a sympathetic judge, etc etc.
Meanwhile, you seem to be advocating for fighting draconian or ridiculous intellectual property laws or actions by...letting the market decide? That's not going to work out.
Just because someone makes a desirable product certainly does not give them the right to "get away with [all] sorts of crap" just because "people will put up with it". People often aren't going to vote with their wallet, which is exactly the point. SOPA could very well have passed and people would still have bought content from the companies that were very publicly pushing to have it passed. Stopping consumption of big content so you won't get upset when sites are summarily censored doesn't stop the underlying injustice, and it certainly won't stop the inevitable expansion of the scope of those powers as intellectual property "owners" demand perpetual extensions of their "rights".
As an example: the public domain is in some ways a right of the public, since the constitution allows only time-limited copyright. Whether or not you consume "big content" now, you will have the right to unfettered access to it eventually, that is, unless companies can convince congress to continue to extend copyright length to make copyright length perpetual in practice.
> Meanwhile, you seem to be advocating for fighting draconian or ridiculous intellectual property laws or actions by...letting the market decide? That's not going to work out.
I'm against government spending lots of money to help enforce copyright. I was against SOPA because it forces third parties to help protect content providers' property rights. Which is unreasonable. After all, the law doesn't force my neighbors to help protect my property rights. People are responsible for policing their own property rights for the most part.
But that's not what is at issue here. Charging per viewer for content is like BMW charging ridiculous amounts for parts and labor for their cars. Who cares? If you buy a BMW you know that being gouged for maintenance is part and parcel of the experience. It's between you and the company you are buying from.
I'm not a free market true believer by any means. I think there are lots of problems not solved by the market and we need affirmative measures in those cases. But I suppose with the copyright debate, I just don't agree that there is really a problem. If Disney figures out a way to charge you every time you watch their shitty movies, then great, more power to them. It's a great business model to sell something that is physically totally fungible, but which consumers perceive as non-fungible (LV bags, BMW cars, etc). The fact that consumers eat it up anyway doesn't strike me as a problem worth solving.
Except you have a right to show a film to "a normal circle of family and its social acquaintances" (aka not a "public" performance), and you have your fair use rights. If a company uses some camera-based DRM scheme to take away that ability, you have a tension between your rights to the use of copyrighted works and the government-enforced anti-circumvention rules in the DMCA.
This is another area (with closely related time-shifting and device-shifting) that companies will overstep their bounds on if allowed, in order to lock in consumers, and it is again via the enforcement of the government. That seems to fall under the area of things you oppose.
If all we had to worry about was the inconvenience of a legal jailbreak, I would let lemming consumers twist in the wind as well.
(all this is fairly theoretical, as it relies on someone getting this scheme to work even somewhat reliably, but the point stands for much of the copyright overreaches we face today)
I've often wondered if there ought to be some kind of access to culture defense for copyright infringement.
The creators of copyrighted works reap the benefits of their work becoming integral parts of popular culture; their status as culturally significant works afford them a wide range of pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits.
At the same time, there is a negative externality associated with a copyrighted work becoming part of popular culture; insofar as one must stay abreast of developments in popular culture to continue having meaningful discussions with friends, to understand the terminology other people use, and indeed to make their own original contributions to popular culture.
There definitely is. That's a large part of the essence of fair use -- which allows commentary, parody, and reporting on copyrighted works without any say by the copyright holder, as well as use in education and research (and, with the first sale doctrine, allows libraries to lend books, music and movies to the public for (more or less) free).
Too late to edit, but it's also the point of having all works eventually enter into the public domain (and a powerful argument for shorter copyright lengths).
People have created view once video tapes that cannot be rewound. People have created limited life DVDs that begin to self-destruct when they come into contact with air.
Disney[1] used to oppose video for this very reason - you couldn't tell how many people were watching and so you couldn't charge them each a fee.
[1] I used to be able to find references to this. I can't now. There's a bunch of stuff that happened in the 1980s which feels harder to find than it should.
There's a bunch of stuff that happened in the 1980s which feels harder to find than it should.
Amen, brother. For a long time, Ed Greer (http://articles.latimes.com/1989-02-03/news/mn-1871_1_ed-gre...) was not mentioned on the internet. He's finally arrived, and his message is: "Never become too good at something you hate. They'll make you do it the rest of your life."
I used to have that article pinned to my bulletin board, but it finally disappeared. No Ed Greer for years. But hey, he's back!
I must admit, though, that the Kinect-viewer-surveillance patent is an encouraging step. (Could a future Kinect add a visible-spectrum laser to temporarily blind unauthorized audience members?)
So if M$ patented this technology, does it mean that other companies can not use this kind of shit to limit their users? If so this would be a good thing.
This technology may be used for this purpose but I doubt it will be any time soon. Patent filings are incredibly vague often times and a system that detects how many people are in front of a box doesn't necessarily have to be used to prevent people from watching movies with their friends even if it can.
This article just seems like catnip for people who want go off about how dumb the copyright industry is and how much they hate copyright in general. The copyright system may be fucked and it'd be hard to argue otherwise but in this case, in the context of this article let's just take off the tinfoil hats and slow down here.