Vice President of iPod and iPhone Product Marketing Greg Joswiak is set to testify Friday afternoon in Palo Alto, California, as the Copyright Office holds the in a series of hearings on possible exemptions to the nation's copyright law. The office holds these hearings every three years. In the past it has granted copy exemptions to people such as college film professors who want to make compilations for their students or users of obsolete software who need to copy their programs to new media formats.

This year marks the first time the office will hear arguments about the iPhone, however, and Apple is doing its best to stop the jailbreakers. It has hired well-respected Fenwick & West intellectual property lawyer David Hayes to represent it at the hearing, and has filed a (pdf) arguing that legalizing jailbreaking would lead to "copyright infringement, potential damage to the device and other potential harmful physical effects, adverse effects on the functioning of the device, and breach of contract."

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter.

Although it has not prosecuted hackers who have developed jailbreak software, Apple maintains that the practice violates the DMCA, which prohibits the circumvention of copy control mechanisms.

Technical users have been jailbreaking the iPhone since soon after it was released two years ago, despite Apple's best efforts to make it impossible. Apple strictly controls what software can run on the iPhone, but jailbroken phones have no such restrictions.