Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009    Text size: 

Steve Jobs’ empire is working on a patent for what the company called an “enforcement routine” that could interact with virtually any device with a screen. The enforcement routine would freeze the device and present the user with an advertisement. In order to unfreeze the device the user would have to answer a question.

According to the patent application, this functionality would be woven into the device’s core code. That would not only make it more difficult to disable, but it would also give advertisers the power to deliver ads at any time, no matter what the user was doing.

In addition, the patent also specifies that the ads can increase in number and intensity if a user ignores them. For example, if a user repeatedly ignores ads, they will shrink and demand the user enter in more and more complicated keystrokes, including strings of random characters, the current date or the name of the advertiser.

What’s the upside? The tech’s inventors said that Apple could potentially offer various products for free if users agreed to watch the ads. Hardware could then become its own upsell, because users could later pay a fee to deactivate the ads.

The patent application, which bears Steve Jobs' name and approval, has received mixed reaction from the tech community. Randall Stross of the New York Times bemoaned the involvement of the normally user-friendly Jobs in the project.

“How Mr. Jobs reconciles this advertising technology with Apple’s culture is not known,” he said.

But ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes suggested that the technology could be used to sell content, not hardware.

“Compared to the price of the hardware, content is pennies, and it’s easy to see a mechanism that allows owners to collect content credits in exchange for watching or listening to a few ads,” he said. Later, he added, “A certain number of credits buys you a song, a higher level allows you to rent a movie, and more credits would allow you to buy a movie. You’d have to watch a heck of a lot of ads to make up for a $100 reduction in the price of a device.”