Google Patents Censorship of "Annoying" Content 114
An anonymous reader writes "Google has been granted a patent for a rating engine that reserves the right to approve or reject content that is published on the Internet. The patent especially refers to advertising and those rather invasive and disturbing blinking ads that exploit the entire range of color pairs that are found displeasing to the human eye: 'The embodiments described herein enable Flash and animated image documents (e.g., advertisements). Some of these types of ads are annoying.' However Google notes that ads are just an 'illustrative example' and the idea could be applied to 'content pages (e.g., web pages), search results, emails, applications, IM messages, audio content or files, video content or files, other files, other data or applications that may reside on one or several (e.g., a network) of computer systems, or other definable concepts or content.'"
how impartial? (Score:2, Insightful)