Jailbreak the ipod touch - go to real jail?

The Canadian government is at it again, putting forward another bill that will restrict our rights and freedoms in favour of the record labels. As usual, Michael Geist has a lot of important information on what is going on, and also what you can do about it.

BoingBoing is also carrying this story (God bless their souls) and in some ways they put it best: (The proposed laws)... will contain an "anti-circumvention" clause that prohibits breaking the locks off your music and movies in order to move them to new devices or watch them after the company that made them goes out of business... with no exceptions to the ban on circumvention, not even for parody, fair dealing, time shifting, or other legal uses.

Let's break this down: our office recently got ipod touches. About half of the people here have already performed the jailbreak hack to open up their devices. That alone would now be against the law, even if all they ever did was install a few freeware applications, or God forbid, they wrote their own programs to use on this 'little computer called ipod.'

If you read this, please - write your Member of Parliament. Here is a handy link to find their contact info and remember - a physical letter is worth millions of emails to these guys. Since it is going to the government, postage is paid too, so no 'I'm to cheap to afford a stamp' excuses. For the really lazy, the govt actually provides a point and click method of putting together a memo to your MP. Thanks again to M. Geist for showing me those links.

This isn't law yet. We can still use our voice to indicate the preference of the people to our representatives.