Big Apple is Watching: How Steve Jobs will soon be able to seize remote control of your iPhone at will

Picture this: you're at a concert, watching your favourite band play your favourite song live. You pull out your iPhone 4, turn on the video camera, eager to capture this moment—the sights, the sounds, the mood.

You hit record, and it works for a couple of seconds. Then it stops, and the app closes, and you can't reaccess it.

Is your iPhone busted? No. That's just Steve Jobs saying, "You can't do that."

Based on patent application filed 18 months ago and now surfacing publicly, Apple intends to embed iPhones with a Big Brother-esque feature in which your video camera can be disabled during live events.

In what is presumably an effort to stop illegal free distribution of content that audiences do not have rights to, Apple plans to use infrared sensors to identify when a camera is recording a live event and then shut down automatically, leaving the mobile user powerless.

One question is, can this technology really be refined to detect only live events where it is illegal to record the event? And another is, should a company be allowed to have such potent remote control of a user's device that they are supposed to own in full?

If you ask me, this is taking Apple's iron grip on consumers a step too far, especially after Apple was already busted for some rather suspicious location tracking.