Tuesday
In a move certain to bring the wrath of Jobs down on him, the Librarian of Congress – James H. Billington – yesterday announced a new ruling on US Copyright law, declaring that it’s OK to hack your iPhone to run non-Apple approved apps, or even use a different wireless provider.
The decision on a practice known as “jailbreaking” was one of several key changes in U.S. copyright law filed by the head of the Library of Congress, which also ruled that short clips can be legally copied from movie DVDs to make videos for purposes of comment or criticism.
The rulings were “a major victory for consumers,” said Corynne McSherry, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco digital rights organization that pushed for the clarifications. “Copyright law should be supporting fair use and not getting in the way of it.”
Apple, for its part, says it’s just trying to protect its poor, pathetic (some – but not I – might even say “sheep-like”) customers, who aren’t capable of deciding for themselves what apps to use, and need the not-so-invisible hand of Apple to guide them in the right direction. I’d guess only a handful of iPhone users have both the skill and desire to jailbreak their phones, but expect to see frequent iPhone OS updates designed to circumvent the process and brick any jailbreaked (jailbroken?) phones. Hopefully they won’t inadvertently brick any non-jailbroken phones in the process.
Here in NY, our very lame duck Governor is once again making noise about laying off state workers, despite a pledge (which may or may not be binding, depending on who you listen to) not to lay anybody off until at least January 2011.
Gov Blinky then proceeded to throw out the first pitch at a T-ball game, which is kinda funny on a couple of levels. First, the Gov is legally blind, and while they pointed him in the right direction, his pitch was (to put it kindly) a wee bit high. More importantly, though, there is no first pitch in T-ball. There are no pitches period. They put the ball on a tee (hence the name “T-ball”), and the kid whacks away at it. Even the Governor could probably hit the ball (though they’d have to make sure they pointed him toward first base).
I typically expect people to be self-centered assholes, but I ran into a new example yesterday afternoon. I was back a bit in a line of cars waiting to pull out of the grocery store parking lot. Since it’s a busy street, I wasn’t really surprised that we weren’t actually moving – until I happened to notice there weren’t any cars coming. Then I saw why. Some jackass in a fancy convertible (didn’t really see what kind it was, but it looked pretty snazzy) had decided to put his top down, so the rest of us had to wait. Never mind he could have put his goddamn top down before he pulled out of the parking lot, and f*ck the peasants behind him. I have no doubt this guy made out very well from the Bush tax cuts.
Oh well, time to go.
