Microsoft Seeking to Patent Automatic Censorship

theodp writes "Microsoft is back at the USPTO, this time seeking a patent for the automatic censorship of audio data for broadcast, a system and method for automatically altering audio to prevent undesired words and phrases from being understandable to a listener as originally uttered."

Too late

[criordan]

I think someone already invented this a while back. They're called "highway overpasses."

Sounds very sick

[EmbeddedJanitor]

What kind of fucked-up parent lets their 9 year old play XBox Live in the first place?

Gee this won't be misused...

[slashname3]

Can you imagine the spin off technology? Instead of just censoring peoples speech you could alter it to say politically correct things. Imagine someone speaking in public and the system automatically changing their speech from one that makes the oil companies look bad to one that extols the oil companies virtues in the on going oil crisis. No one gets to hear the actual speech the person intended to deliver. Talk about being able to spin something before anyone gets to hear the damaging speech.

Re:Sounds very sick

[Spacejock]

I bought Fable for the PC, and my daughters saw it and immediately wanted to play it. However, it carries an M rating and when I checked my character stats I saw why: One of the entries says 'number of times had sex'
The thing is, the game has cutesy graphics and starts out with this innocuous-looking kid like something out of an N64 game. At first glance it DOES look like a childs game, so who are they marketing it to?

this is good

[penguin-collective]

I'm all for bad patents on bad ideas, because it will make it harder for other people to actually use the bad idea.

Of course, maybe the EFF should take notice and preemptively patent some of the f*cked up, obvious things people are going to misapply technology to over the next years.