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.