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The New York Times is reporting that Apple has filed a patent for a new advertising technology that will make commercials impossible to ignore by freezing the user’s device and forcing them to interact with the ad (by clicking or answering a question) before the device (both video and music) will continue operation. The patent was filed last year and was made public last month.

Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad—it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.

Hands up: who thinks this is a bad idea? It’s especially shocking—not just because everyone hates ads, and most new media technology (heck, going all the way back to the video cassette recorder) is based around avoiding commercials—but because Apple has always pushed the idea of people paying to own media (and high-profit devices), rather than subsidizing it through ads or subscriptions.

But do they have another plan in mind? Fake Steve seems to think so:

But see, that’s the point. We don’t expect anyone will choose the ads. Because, for a very reasonable monthly fee, you’ll be able to eliminate all those ads and get your content free of all nterruptions. How reasonable, you say? Well, let’s say that for $30 a month you could watch all the TV you wanted. Let’s say that we can get all the TV networks, or most of them anyway, on board for this. Let’s say that we give you not just this week’s shows but an enormous archive, one that ultimately includes every TV show ever made. Tear out the cable box, stop paying those assholes $100 or $200 a month, and go with us instead.

Thus Apple now becomes the cable company. And the cable company dies.

I had to admit, it makes as much sense as anything. I’d love to have an a la carte video system rather than paying Comcast for 100 channels when I don’t watch 80 of them.

So what do you think; is this another operation like the original iTunes store where the record companies got involved because they thought that they had nothing to lose, only to find that they had inadvertently put Apple in control with no easy way to back out? Are the television, film, and production companies eying easy ways to boost ad revenues, only to figure out too late that Apple doesn’t want to save the old system, but to destroy it?

Read [The New York Times] and [The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs]