SOPA Would Kill iPhone Jailbreaking

 

Well, almost everyone on the web has heard about SOPA. Most of you must have come across a number of sites protesting SOPA as Google, Wikipedia and Reddit. So what is SOPA? What does it mean for jailbreakers? Read below for more info.

SOPA means Stop Online Piracy Act. Brian Barret over at Gizmodo made a good explanation on what SOPA is and what it exactly means:

The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site’s ISP prevent people from even going there.

For more information about SOPA, you can take a look on Gizmodo’s article here.

Anyway, let’s talk about jailbreaking and SOPA. What’s bad about SOPA for jailbreaking? The iPhone hacker and Chronic Dev Team member p0sixninja pointed out on his Twitter account that SOPA could make the distribution of jailbreaking software illegal.

This would surely affect our business and prevent us from writing jailbreak tutorials and posting about jailbreak tools.

As most of you know, jailbreaking your iPhone is currently legal according to the US Government but with SOPA coming next month, everything might be changed.

What should you do now? In case you’re a U.S. citizen, you can e-mail your respective congressmen from here. You can also read Google take-down page here to find more info and fight SOPA.