Last Saturday we told you about a story picked up by The Verge about an early stage planning document for “Xbox 720”, which included specs for a new Xbox, a $ 299 price tag, details about Kinect 2, and a Microsoft Research project dubbed “Kinect Glasses”. In the NeoGAF forum post where The Verge found a Scribd link to the document, many of the commenters called the 56 page PowerPoint document a fake, a perhaps somewhat elaborate hoax.
The document was taken down “at the request of Covington & Burling, LLP”, a law firm that counts Microsoft as one of its clients, but it had been available for download for some time, and other sites had taken to host a copy.
Now today, The Verge is reporting that at least some of these sites, including Dropbox, are being served with takedown notices of their own, although this time, in detailing the reasons for the takedown notice, Microsoft in effect verified the authenticity of the document:
Microsoft has received information that the domain listed above, which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted works published by Microsoft.
1. Identification of copyrighted works:
Copyrighted work(s):
IEB RoadmapCopyright owner:
Microsoft Corporation2. Copyright infringing material or activity found at the following location(s):
xxxxxxxxxxx-XBox-720-9-24-Checkpoint-Draft-1.pptx
So now, while we can’t be sure that we’ll be wearing Kinect Glasses anytime soon, and much may have changed in the time since the document was produced, thought to be sometime in August / September of 2010, at least we know that the information contained in the “Checkpoint Draft” was owned and copyrighted by Microsoft.
Just to recap, the document describes a number of as yet unreleased plans for the next Xbox, which it says will become available in time for the 2013 holiday season, details an entertainment media focus (Blu-ray, always on architecture, whole home DVR), emphasis on companion devices (PC/phone/slate), a next generation Kinect and Kinect Glasses, and a roadmap out through 2015, and quite a bit more.