Apple’s anti-piracy technology is based on a simple but ingenious idea. In movie theaters, they distribute special infrared waves for hearing aid devices. Apple’s new technology will enable the iPhone to detect those infrared signals and the iPhone will sense that you are in a movie theater. Now if you will try to record a scene from Kung Fu Panda 2 with your iPhone this weekend, it will automatically sense that you are in a movie theater trying to record, and will shut off the camera automatically. Another possibility with the same technology can be that the movie/snap you capture will be watermarked with the name of the movie.

The same will be true with music concerts, if you try to take a picture of Lady Gaga, the whole picture could be watermarked with LadyGaga, but for that concert the management will have to bombard infrared waves on the audience.

This technology may have other implications as well, such as in museums and historical places. Here the authorities can set up infrared signals for each place, so that when you point your iPhone towards that, it will catch those signals and then show the detailed info about that on your iPhone screen, replacing the human guide or tour guide headphones.

It may take some time to completely implement this technology, and it may take even longer for us to see the practical implications of this technology. But none the less, even though this technology is simple and ingenious, it will have far reaching effects. Whether people like it or not, the millions of artists worldwide will love it since they lose money from piracy on a daily basis.
At the end of the day, anti-piracy laws will more than likely be something that we become accustomed to with time. However, these new laws will no doubt make big waves at first as people begin to think that their personal freedoms are being limited when they can no longer do what they want to do with the hardware that they have purchased. Fortunately or unfortunately, companies are in the business of making money, and taking the hard line with piracy will benefit their bottom line.

Martin’s Take: This patent is about remote controlling functionality on Apple devices. Turning off features on the phone while the guy with his Android phone can still take a picture of his loved one on the concert, may be seen positively by the industry, but certainly not by consumers.

I have not found any limitations to that feature online. Can the technology turn off the complete phone? What if the phone is turned off then and someone needs to call in an emergency?

This new technology is one step closer to 1984 in my opinion, with company’s being able to control what you can do with your electronic devices, and what you cannot.

The article did not contain information about the technology behind Trimark other than that the “identification code maintains it’s integrity, despite copying or ripping.” This is a very bold statement and I personally don’t think that such a system will be possible unless they implement it in music that can be purchased in digital form only.

Trimark assumes that users who spread music are purchasing it before they spread it. While this might be true for the occasional P2P user this does not hold true for the big release groups. They get their stuff directly from the producers, the factory or a retail store without a possibility to be identified.

Several cases speak for themselves where music albums have been found on P2P networks weeks or even months before the official release date.

Let us suppose they release Trimark and integrate it into all digital mp3′s that are sold:

• This does not bother the release groups who spread the music albums way before anyone else gets their hands on them
• This does not bother the users who rip audio CDs and make them available on P2P
• This does not bother the users that record Internet radio and share it.
• This does not bother the users who know about Trimark
• This does not bother the downloaders at all
• The main target as I can see it are the users who do not know about Trimark and upload some of their purchased songs to the Usenet. I’m not able to estimate the number but I personally do not think that it will be such a large amount of users.

I can only come to the conclusion from what we know about Trimark that the system will be highly ineffective. As always, the only users that are found this way are the ones that are not informed about this new system.

• Run Task Manager
• Kill the WgaTray.exe Process
• Go to System32 folder
• Rename wgatray.exe and wgalogon.dll to something else
• Restart
• End of annoying messages

[tags]microsoft, genuine, anti-piracy, ms, windows xp, wgatray.exe, wgalogon.dll[/tags]