John was railing against the Intellectual Property Protection Act in the US in the Observer yesterday:

"the IPPA in its current form proposes to make it a criminal offence to skip over adverts in digitally recorded content. If passed, this would mean that American viewers would be allowed to skip or block material containing sex, violence and bad language, but could be prosecuted if they so much as dared to skip an advertisement.

How's that for effrontery? But there's more - the PIRATE Act, for example, which would allow the Justice Department to file civil suits against copyright infringers. What this means is that the record and movie studios, blanching at their mounting legal bills, have pushed an act that would essentially turn the US Justice Department into their in-house litigation section.

Verily, you couldn't make this stuff up. Another section of the IPPA would make it a criminal offence to share any digital content with anyone. This is intended to stop people illicitly sharing music and movie files via peer-to-peer networks. But, as drafted, the act would actually criminalise the Apple iTunes store - that agreeable poster-child for legitimate music downloading."

Not to mention emailing your parents with a picture of their grandchildren...