"It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too."
It is a very good idea, but there's another problem at hand: It's not novel. I remember hearing about this many years ago, though that was using vibrations in windows to get the sound inside a building. IMO there's nothing to patent here. Unless this is the same group it's just appropriating someone else's work.
Besides, random people do think of cool stuff all the time. They just don't normally patent it or start a business based on it. I thought of real-time music streaming to phones as a subscription service way before Spotify was a thing, but there wasn't much that 15 year old me could do about it. To this day I still have no idea how I would have gone about with a similarly good idea if I got one again.
It was a plot point in the movie Eagle Eye, which came out in 2008. Maybe there's something more specific in the patent though.
And I don't know if there was a real service for this, but the idea of music streaming to phones is pretty old. Peter Shickele used it on his parody album Two Pianos are Better than One which came out in 1994. It was called "Inter-Ear TelecommuniCulturePhone - Trademark!"
>vibrations in windows to get the sound inside a building
That is a totally unrelated problem. Recovering sound from a series of still photos compared to recovering sound from vibrations is a completely different issue altogether. Actually executing and doing it is even more different, as you run into all the implementation issues and physical bugaboos. When someone doesn't just have some vague notion, but actually implements a wholly new technique to do something previously impossible, whether it was imagined by others or not, is a patent really that absurd?
The key difference is that a laser microphone is amplifying the actual vibrations caused by the sounds as they're being produced. This is using silent video and knowledge about the acoustic properties of the depicted objects & environment to simulate/recreate the sound that was not captured. You can't point a laser microphone at the past.
I remember the same thing being demonstrated on a mass-market network in the late 90s / early 00's. It was probably the Discovery channel, or similar, and likely a 'spy gadget' type show.
I'd guess someone in the military or intelligence community implemented initial prototypes not long after LASERs became available.
I can only work on one thing at a time. Just because I didn't implement this, it only really means that I prioritized implementing something else over this.
Do you believe that implementation has no time-cost?
Also, I don't think your appropriated quote addresses the implications of the MIT License, its history and associated institution, or the liberation of knowledge.
Don't mean to put too fine a point on it, but could you give me any example of an invention throughout history that you would not class as obvious? I'm wondering what your standards are.
You can't patent an idea. The patent is for the method of extracting sound from tiny vibrations in a video. The method is novel and non-obvious, and follows from their work in motion magnification.