Apple wants to fine and jail iPhone jailbreakers.

Jailbreaking. It might conjure the image of Andy Dufresne tunneling out of Shawshank Prison, arising victoriously in the pouring rain as lightning thunders above, but it has a much different meaning when applied to phones. What it means is, if you want to install a third party application, use a different wallpaper, and/or add a ringtone, you must break through Apple's protection scheme.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has delivered a petition to congress asking for a law to protect those that "jailbreak" their phones. Apple, in its usual "any color as long as it's black" approach has filed an objection. Not only do they not want you to be able to install whatever you want, they also want fines of "up to $2,500" per act, meaning that adding a wallpaper, ringtone, and two third party apps could net you up to $10,000 in fines. Not to be outdone by itself, Apple has also recommended that jail time of up five years for those that break those phones for financial gain. Meaning that if someone charged money for a third party app or a program that enabled jailbreaking iPhones, they could be sentenced to real prison time, where jailbreaking isn't quite as easy and can result in actual death.

The big question, of course, is who really owns your damned phone? Apple says that bypassing their software restrictions messes with the "chain of trust" they've set up and screws up their "ecosystem." The EFF counters that if you apply Apple's argument to another industry, it falls apart:

One need only transpose Apple's arguments to the world of automobiles to recognize their absurdity. Sure, GM might tell us that, for our own safety, all servicing should be done by an authorized GM dealer using only genuine GM parts. Toyota might say that swapping your engine could reduce the reliability of your car. And Mazda could say that those who throw a supercharger on their Miatas frequently exceed the legal speed limit.

On a more serious note, they point out:

But the courts have long recognized that copying software while reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software, a body of law that Apple conveniently fails to mention.

The EFF has set up a "Free Your Phone" website where you can follow the case as it moves before the Library of Congress: www.freeyourphone.org.
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Now, I know I'm hard on Apple, probably a little bit unfairly at times. That's because I expect a company that holds itself as so much better for the consumer to, you know, actually stand by its words. It's also because Apple has a long history of bullshit, such as claiming that it owns the copyright to the mouse, that it owns the rights to the "trash bin" concept in software, and Jobs' long-time stance against unapproved third party applications for the Mac and charging for their SDK. In fact, it was the stance of the latter that catapulted Windows into being the dominant OS that it is today. Good job, Steve!

Within all due credit, I love the ease of use and the functionality of OS X, although I do find its platform to be rather shallow at times and not particularly useful for mass data storage and retrieval. I love its embedded Post Script and its wonderful capability of handling fonts. So, I guess it would be fair to say that I love OS X, but hate Apple. And this recent move by them only seeks to cement the views of so many detractors.