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Apple has decided that it’s not only unsupported, but also illegal, to jailbreak your iPhone. Don’t worry yet, though. As of right now, only Apple supports this notion, so unless they hire iCops with real power to arrest, you’ll be safe with your haxx0red iPhone or iPod touch.

It all began with the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, filing a request with the U.S Copyright Office to exempt “computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute lawfully obtained software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications with computer programs on the telephone handset” from being considered copyright infringement. In other words, they want jailbroken phones to be considered perfectly fine to have around, because it makes “interoperability” easier by allowing for things not allowed with the iPhone SDK, such as copy and paste, simultaneously running applications, etc.

Apple responded, saying that jailbreaking would only make security weaker, support issues more frequent, and consumers more unhappy. (Not unlike the reason they won’t license Mac OS X to generic PC manufacturers: if you don’t control software and hardware, it’s a lot harder to make a good, usable product.) Apple also says that jailbreaking fails all four provisions for fair use, essentially calling it copyright infringement, and a crime. The Copyright Office will rule on this in October.

Via [AppleInsider]