A news-story about Apple attempting to patent a technology that will prevent you from filming certain live-events has been floating around for a few days now. Yesterday it started to filter into the swedish press as well. (You can read more about it in swedish at MacFeber and in english at MicroBlogBuzz). Needless to say the haters hate, the tin-foil hats go crazy and the press gets a few ad-clicks more.

So what’s my take on this? First of all, I think a patent and a real world implementation are two totally different things. For all I know this might be a move to mess with another hardware-vendor rather then us customers. I don’t think it can be exactly what the press predicts since the backlash on Apple would be far to big.

Second, interestingly enough I haven’t seen anything about this in neither Macworld nor Daring Fireball, even though these are generally the best sources of Apple news. Sure, the tin-foil hat might say. That’s because the Macworld staff and John Gruber (then man behind Daring Fireball) are Apple fan-boys who wants to cover it up! Anyone with half a brain will off-course realize how stupid that sounds.

And third, Apple is not the devil! (Neither is Google, Microsoft, Facebook or any other large corporation.) It’s a technology company interested in making money by selling hardware and software to people. The things they do aren’t motivated by some evil plan to rule the world. It’s simple business decisions. Stop seeing every move by a big company as something inherently evil.