Apple’s ‘Advertisement in OS’ Patent Shows Intent That Apple Wants a Captive Audience, Literally
By Alexander Grundner |
November 17th, 2009 
The phrase, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” I believe applies here. I don’t think anyone saw this coming. Apple has filed for a patent (USPTO: 20090265214), which Steve Jobs has signed off on, that will enable its operating system on a variety of devices to display ads which users must act on to signal they’ve viewed an ad, else the application (or even the device) in use will lock down.
According to the patent filing, the intrusive ads not only affect video content, but audio as well. The technology will prompt music player users to press a particular key or button to verify the listener is “paying attention” to the advertisement. The filing goes on to state: “In one implementation, the approaches for verifying user presence can be made progressively more aggressive if the user has failed a previous test.”
On the brightside, if there is one such a case, users will be able to buy these products at a discount and/or upgrade them to make them ad-free on a temporary or permanent basis.
More on this story at the NYTimes.com [reprint here].
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