If you want to play old school games on your iPad you can still do it but now, you will in fact be breaking the law. This is because under new rules that were issued by the U.S. government, jailbreaking the iPad is now a violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This came into law on the 28th of October 2012.
You will remember back in 2010 iPhone owners breathed a sigh of relief when it was ruled that jailbreaking smartphones was perfectly legal under the DMCA. This is still the case but the updated list of exemptions explicitly excludes tablets, a category of devices that the government found to be too �broad and ill-defined� to allow their owners free reign when using them. So from now, it is illegal to jailbreak the iPad or any other tablet device.4
This really doesn�t make any sense. You are free to jailbreak your iPhone but you can�t run the same jailbreaking tool on a larger device running the same operating system. You can access Cydia on your iPhone but you can�t do it on a screen that is a few inches bigger. It really is bizarre and staring from January 2013, it will be illegal to unlock new smartphones for the purpose of switching carriers. Unlocking older devices will still be fine though.
When the news of this broke iOS jailbreak developer MuscleNerd expressed concern about it on Twitter. He stated that unlocking is no longer an explicit DMCA exemption, neither is jailbreaking iPads. No exemption = illegal. We are sure that developers like MuscleNerd are not happy about this news because it means they will have to be a lot more cautious about building new jailbreak tools for iOS. Tools like Redsn0w will still be able to jailbreak iPhones but the developers may have to add something to ensure that they won�t work on iPads or include some fine print about using them on iPads.
An untethered jailbreak for iOS 6 hasn�t yet been released so we will have to wait and see if these new laws will have any impact on what the jailbreak community is working on.
