Rock Band players enjoy Coke(tm)! See the Coke(tm) side of life!

So in a forthcoming update for Xbox Live, users will be downloading Silverlight capability for their Live interactions.  Sounds good?  Think again.  Apparently the primary reasoning behind delivering Microsoft’s Flash counterpart to your system will be to introduce advertising to your dashboard.

That’s right, get ready for EVEN MORE advertisement to infiltrate your system!

Apparently not only is it good enough for ads for Xmen Origins: Wolverine to be smeared all over your copy of Guitar Hero 3 for no apparent reason, you’ll now also be serviced with ads by just switching the damn machine on.

Prepare for a PlayStation fanboy rush, Xbox users.  Start populating those Terran bunkers.

Either way, after a few days of speculation around different sites, our foremost public face of Live, Major Nelson, has spoken out about the issue.

One of our core principles is to enhance, not interfere with the gaming experience, and we work directly with our partners to only deliver experiences that are relevant to the LIVE community. Silverlight will help make those ads a more organic part of the dashboard, like we’ve done with some of the NXE slots in the past. No one on the team wants to turn the dashboard into something that looks like like Shibuya Crossing.

-Major Nelson tries to set some minds at ease

A lot of users are understandably annoyed, especially those who pay their monthly rates for Live Gold.  The very odd juxtaposition of both paying for a service and being loaded up with marketing at the same time sits uneasily in the stomach.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we begin hearing more about this around the internet, but for the time being it looks as if it’s inevitable.

A rather amusing tale of litigation, care of Kotaku.  After having Sony settle out of court, Microsoft is the one remaining company still being sued over it’s online game interaction.  The suit is being pressed over a patent filed in 1994, here’s the details:

In 1991, Peter Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum came up with the idea of communicating live while playing the same video game in separate locations. They patented the technology for doing so in 1994. In 2002, Microsoft released Xbox Live, a gaming service that also allows users to communicate while playing the same game. Sony also released similar capabilities for PlayStation 2. In 2004, Hochstein, Tenenbaum and Harold Milton, Jr. (an assignee of the patent) brought a patent infringement suit against Microsoft and Sony alleging that the voice and data communications technology used in the gaming systems infringed on the patent claims.

Being Microsoft, they’ve dropped some fairly lulzy stunts on the case to tie it up (including dropping 140,000 “relevant” documents on Hochenstein and Tenenbaum, sans-index), but in the process have drawn a lot of heat from the court for their obvious stalling.  Apparently this may have cost them dearly, because it sounds as if the court is out of patience and may force a resolution soon.

Now while I’ll agree that MS and Sony should be paying up for any variety of patent infringement, it also seems like this is kind of a cash in measure on the part of the plaintiff.  It’s kind of akin to someone long ago pantenting the idea of reading books with coffee, then many years later suing a Borders store.

Actually, we’ve been looking for ways to finance the site recently.  And Borders HAVE been increasing their Australian stakehold.

Hmmmmmmmmm ……

You can read the whole article over at Patent Arcade.

Sigh, rhyming headlines, I must have my news hat on too tight today.  Nevertheless, details coming straight-outta-Joystiq today, talking about Xbox Live’s integration with Last.Fm.

The service was announced at this year’s E3, including linking up Facebook and Twitter to Live.  Apparently the Last.Fm service will be free but contain ads for Gold accounts, and there will be 3 hour trials for Silver users.

Silver users will be able access what we’re considering a trial period of three hours a month, which comes with video advertising. Gold users will have unlimited ad-supported access, so they can use it 24 hours a day. There will also be a premium offering on a subscription basis from Last.fm, that will be commercial free and will also have more sophisticated personalization features, like Loved Tracks.

-Christina DeRosa, general manager with XBL

The premium service is an additional subscription fee that will be paid directly to Last.fm.  Using the service via Live will still require a registered Last.fm account.  Check out the whole article.