Apple Tech Would Stop iPhones From Filming Live Events | Hacker News Reader

Apple Tech Would Stop iPhones From Filming Live Events

foxnews.com

5 pointsminalecs8 comments

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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