The 7 words you can’t say on iTunes

Tonight there’s gonna be trouble I’m gonna find myself in/Tonight there’s gonna be a j*****k, so woman stay with a friend.

If you’re a Thin Lizzy fan, you probably recognize the lyrics to “Jailbreak,” but you probably don’t remember the song title featuring mostly asterisks. For a few hours last week on iTunes, however, that’s how the word appeared to some people visiting the store.

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It seems that, for reasons as yet unclear, someone at Apple decided “jailbreak” was a four-letter word and treated it the same way iTunes treats the words “f**k,” “s**t,” and “t**s.” I’m talking of course about “folk,” “soot,” and “tots.” What words did you think I meant?

That filter applied not only to the handful of apps using the name “jailbreak,” but also to the Irish rockers’ 1976 classic, as well as podcasts, books, and episodes of “The Real World: Austin” and “The Roy Rogers Show.” And though it didn’t affect everyone who visited the store, it affected enough of them to make for several perplexed blog posts.

Apple corrected the asterisk problem within a few hours. Was it a bug? A test of a new filtering system? A practical joke? Your guess is as good as mine.

My money is on the last one. I think someone at Apple was having a bit of fun. Why? Because that “bug” happened to coincide with hearings held by the U.S. Copyright Office over the right to jailbreak iPhones.

Two years ago, the U.S. Library of Congress ruled that, just as you could buy a car from a dealer and tinker with it in your garage, owners of smartphones had the right to tinker with the OS — meaning that jailbreaking was no longer an offense punishable under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Every two years, the Copyright Office holds new hearings over possible exceptions to the DMCA. That was last Thursday, more or less around the same time people starting noticing the j*******k effect. The exception the copyright cops carved out for smartphone hacking expires next year. The question is whether to renew it.

That meant Hollywood & friends had the chance to square off against digital activists, librarians, hackers, and the rest of the anti-DMCA throng at the UCLA School of Law.

Along with debating phone hacks, U.S. regulators are also considering allowing people to jailbreak their videogame consoles and legally crack the DSS encryption on DVDs.

Regular Cringe readers may recall that hacking Sony’s PS3 last year caused the Japanese consumer electronics giant to get medieval on the assets of noted iPhone jailbreaker George “Geohot” Hotz. In turn, this brought the wrath of Anonymous down upon Sony’s head, which resulted in thoroughly trashing Sony’s online gaming networks, as well as its reputation, and spilling the personal details of some 100 million gamers onto the Webbernets. This is far from a trivial question.

The arguments for allowing hacking of consoles is that it lets “homebrew” developers build and play their own games on the consoles. The argument against? The usual: Hordes of pirates will use the exception to make and distribute illegal copies of their ill-gotten game booty.

Interestingly, neither Sony nor Apple participated in the debate. But the Business Software Alliance’s Steve Metalitz did, landing strongly on the pro-DCMA side. Per the report in Wired:

[Metalitz] added that regulators should not dictate to American companies like Apple what apps they should allow on their phones.

“There is a no God-given right to sell a Chevy at Ford dealers,” he said.

That’s true. But there also shouldn’t be a law that prevents you from dropping a Chevy transmission into a Ford Mustang, which is essentially what the DMCA does.

It’s a strange world where lawyers need to debate how people can use the things they’ve legally paid for. You know there’s gonna be trouble. So better stay with a friend.

Are you bored with the DMCA? Riff on that below or kick out the jams in an email: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “The 7 words you can’t say on iTunes,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.