Evil Smurf said:
simple, Just don't buy that product Microsoft are making.
Actually the point of them patenting this is so that if they develop the technology they can then liscence it to other companies. Microsoft would make the money off of something like this by selling it to movie companies, digital rental services, and similar things.
It pretty much goes down to the old arguement that if you buy a book, you don't actually own the book or the story, but simply have bought permission to personally view/read/consume it. Technically if you lend someone else your book to read, or make copies of it, your comitting a crime since everyone else consuming it should have paid the creator. Harlan Ellison (the science fiction writer) was fond of championing such arguements, and there have been cases against schools and such for photocopying sections of books for students, rather than forcing every student in a class to buy a copy of the book themselves. This being especially true in colleges where they are private businesses, and there is some motivation by teachers to try and cut costs due to the cost of books already being insane.
In the scope of a digital product like a movie, the point would be that a rental of a movie is for one person, if more than one person wants to watch the movie, they should all have to pay "admission". Something you don't currently see because there is no way to track it. If there was a way to track it, it would be embraced however, especially if all the services offering rentals collaberated to ensure there were no alternatives. Microsoft selling the tech to everyone, making a bundle, while the companies themselves make more money through rentals.
On the subject of books, they are rapidly getting to the point where they will probably be digital only. With the right tech, your reading devices could monitor how many individual users have tried to access to content. Devices are already becoming hybrids with cameras and such, and pretty much anything they put a camera on (or could put one on) could be used to monitor and control content consumption, especially as recognition software becomes more effective.
To argue that this is wrong and people would never stand for it, is more or less irrelevent. As things stand now, if big business decides to push for something en-masse there is little stopping them. people choosing to go entirely without media is probably not going to happen. As time goes on and people grow up not knowing it any other way, the complaints will vanish. We already see it now with gouging over things like video games, people complain about the abuses inherant in DLC, microtransactions, and similar things, but as every year goes by you see more people growing up (each generation outnumbering the last) who have never known it any other way. For someone who is in their late 20s, 30s, or 40 to talk about how things were or should be is kind of meaningless, as some teenager or early 20-something who has never known things to be any other way it doesn't matter since they really can't quite visualize it. This is also why there is never any kind of uprising, there are new, sheepish consumers coming into any kind of scam, in greater numbers than the ones who know better at any given point. Today's sheep will be the same way, complaining about the new flock, as they themselves are overrun when business gets even greedier.
I don't like the idea, I think it should be stopped, but honestly I just don't think people have it in them to put their foot down. This won't be here tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure it, or something like it, will be coming.
To be honest, having read a lot of speculative science fiction I always felt we'd see a retina scanning system doing the same basic thing, rather than the kinect-like camera system being talked about here. I figured the start would be when they decided to put retina-locks onto things like iPhones and iPads as a new "security system" to cut down on theft and hacking and such, once in place for those reasons it would be used for content control, and then it would gradually expand into household electronics and such, to the point where eventually you'd need a retinal scan for just about everything, with this lock "protecting your property" actually becoming one that "ensures only a paying customer" can use it. Going so far as to not only limit media, but to make it so that you'd have to pay for everyone in your family to have their retinal scans enabled to turn on the microwave, work the coffee machine, or open the fridge. I guess it's like Jules Verne and books like 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, the basic idea is shockingly accurate to what we'd actually see, but the implenetation and specifics are far differant.
