As with all denizens of the digital age I am often left scratching my head when a large company comes out with a measure that somehow limits what I can do with their device. Aside from the frustration felt by not being able to actually use a device as I see fit, there is the almost embarrassed-for-you feeling I get when I look at the company like I looked at my grandparents trying to emulate my speech patterns. It is just painful.
Such is the case with Apple almost as a habit now. We first saw this when Apple didn’t like Adobe’s concept of self-publishing iPhone apps out of CS5. Solution? Change the terms of use and insert a very small paragraph effectively putting the stomp on that. When in doubt send in legal. It would seem now that Apple’s crack legal team is up to it again with the latest patent application that helps “protect” us from someone thieving our iPhone.
On the one hand Apple applied for this patent so that they could have in place a bunch of clever processes/gadgets that would help either catch the thieves or at least make sure they got away with nothing more than an attractive paper weight. In theory, not too bad. In practice though anyone paying attention could not help but to notice that this comes very close to the federal court ruling that made jailbreaking your iPhone essentially legal. We can’t have that can we? Legal, get on that.
There should be no confusion anymore that we are iPhone fans. That being said, why are we constantly being told what to do with them? To be fair, today’s iPhone has come a long way but in the beginning jailbreaking your phone was the only way to get the functionality you should have had in the first place to work on the phone. (um, video phone, seriously, why would you leave that off?. Desktops, folders, the list goes on). Rightfully so, the court system would agree that interfering with this part of our lives is just wrong. Clearly jailbreaking really offends Steve and one way or another, that jailbreak was not going to pass.
Conclusion: I do not appreciate corporate mega-lawyers finding loop holes in the system to make it so they can continue to govern what I do with MY phone. I would rather have my iPhone stolen and its information compromised than to have Apple tell me how I can or cannot use the phone. It is as simple as that. We can only hope there is a budding 9 year old hacker out there who take his recess time to make a hack for whatever ridiculous system they come out with.
