Fastforward your way to jail: If a bill before Congress passes, you could end up in jail for fast-forwarding through commercials on a TV show you've recorded. The industry-friendly Property Protection Act includes a number of inane proposals including:

a provision that would make it a felony to record a movie in a theater for future distribution on a peer-to-peer network. IPPA would also criminalize the currently legal act of using the sharing capacity of iTunes, Apple’s popular music software program; the legislation equates that act with the indiscriminate file sharing on popular peer-to-peer programs. Currently, with iTunes, users can opt to share a playlist with others on their network. IPPA doesn’t differentiate this innocuous—and Apple sanctioned—act from the promiscuous sharing that happens when someone makes a music collection available to five million strangers on Kazaa or Grokster.

(Via Metafilter.)