[governance] Glimpses of comming attractions?: Microsoft Patents the Censoring of Speech

[Jeffrey A. Williams]

All,

  I can easily see this being very attractive to Censorship biggots...
Is this the future of the Internet we want?  I can see Google or
ICANN using this very liberally.  (  No pun intended )  How
would this fit in an Internet Bill of Rights?  Or does it at
all?

See:
On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded Microsoft a patent for
the  http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7,437,290
Automatic Censorship of Audio Data for Broadcast, an invention
that addresses 'producing censored speech that has been altered so that
undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible.' The
patent describes methods for muting offensive words and replacing them
with less offensive versions, and 'a third alternative provides for
overwriting the undesired word with a masking sound, i.e., "bleeping"
the undesired word with a tone.' After all, there's nothing worse 
than being subjected to offensive speech when you're
http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2007/09/halo-three-xbox-live-microsoft.html
shooting someone in the head.

Regards,

Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 281k members/stakeholders strong!)
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