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.