Apple is awaiting a ruling from the US copyright office  as whether its attempts to block jailbroken phones is actually legal.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation have asked the FTC for a ruling that would  pave the way for third-party apps on the iPhone. While this would be great news for those who want an iPhone it has sent the control freaks in Apple into a spin. Not only would Apple lose the 30 percent for every App sold from its proprietary iTunes store, it would also have to allow its customers to do what they like.

Greg Joswiak, an Apple marketing czar, recently told regulators considering the jailbreaking proposal before the U.S. Copyright Office that such a ruling would severely limit Apple's  ability to continue what it is doing as well as innovate for the future. In other words it would stop it bringing in huge profits at the expense of customer choice something which has been a key stone of Apple's policy for years.

The EFF wants the proposed hack is part of the exemption process under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Every three years, the Librarian of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office entertain proposals for exemptions to copyright law. Few exemptions have every been granted.  One was laws allowing the circumvention of anti-copying restrictions on DVDs for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in a classroom. Another was directed at the blind, allowing the circumvention of an e-book’s shuttered read-aloud function. Another allows the circumvention of access controls on CDs to research for security flaws.

So far the government has repeatedly denied consumer-friendly oriented fair use changes, such as requests to make up backup copies of DVDs or video games, as well as requests for exemptions to enable copying DVDs to laptops and portable devices. The content industry has also lobbied against the jailbreaking proposal backing Apple as  it would create a giant iPhone platform to play and copy infringing content like movies and games.  The content industry loves closed source applications because it can be controlled and charged.