Apple's Patent for Remotely Disabling Phone Cameras Has a Range of (Other) Applications
Apple this week won approval for a patent it filed in 2011 covering a technology to remotely block cell phones from taking pictures or videos.
The patent, granted on Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, describes a way to use infrared signals to send encoded data to cell phones via their cameras. The data could contain either instructions to the cell phone's control circuitry to, say, disable the camera. Or it could contain additional information.
The patent showed two possible applications of each. The first is an infrared emitter placed near an object in a museum (Apple's example is an Aztec Water Jug). If you point the phone camera at the object, it receives an infrared signal instructing the cell phone to give the user additional information about the jug. In Apple's second example, the infrared signal instructs the cell phone to disable recording.
In other words, one application of this technology giveth, while the other taketh away. But... not so fast. First of all, Apple gives no indication in its application as to whether it plans to deploy this technology.
But its potential has wide-ranging ramifications for the music industry, the media and beyond, says David Wendell Phillips, who is Of Counsel at O&A, P.C. and former General Counsel for IGN, AOL and Napster when it was owned by Bertelsmann.
"It's part of a series of related patents" that both Apple and Google are racing to file, Phillips says. "I see this as part of their battle to map the indoors and to connect the digital and physical worlds. This is one of many similar technologies, including iBeacons over Bluetooth, wifi and others that can be used to transmit location-based data and interact with your phone within a defined area."
Whether it's to distribute ads as you walk by a store, or to display a 3D blueprint of a burning building in a heads-up display worn by a firefighter, big tech companies like Apple are exploring multiple options to more tightly integrate their devices and services with the physical world, Phillips says.
