The news that Android users who have jailbroken their phones will be denied access to the new commercial YouTube pay-per-view service is as neat an example of copyright extremism as you could hope for.

Android, of course, is Google's wildly popular alternative to Apple's iOS (the operating system found on iPhones and iPads). Android is free and open – it costs nothing to copy, it can be legally modified and those modifications can be legally distributed. Android products come in varying degrees of lockdown; flagship devices such as the Samsung Nexus S are easy to set up to run competing, unofficial flavours of Android (such as CyanogenMod, which adds lots of useful features and controls to your phone that are missing from the stock Android version). Other phones use various kinds of hardware and software locks that try to get in the way of installing your own OS, and while Google doesn't prohibit this behaviour from its vendors, it also doesn't encourage it – until now.

YouTube is another famous Google product, and it's been a source of consternation for the broadcast and film industries since its inception.

Viacom is presently appealing a judgment against it in its infamous legal bid to shut down the service. Documents revealed during the previous court proceedings featured Viacom executives vigorously and profanely debating which one of them would get to run YouTube once they'd sued it into oblivion. This potent mixture of fear and lust for YouTube is why Viacom was paying multiple ad agencies to sneak video clips on to YouTube even as it was suing it, even going so far as to "rough up" the video before posting it so that it appeared to come from dodgy pirate sites – presumably, posting studio-fresh clips would have given the game away.

Clearly, YouTube has something the entertainment industry wants – reach. And the entertainment industry has something YouTube wants – popular video. While it's true that the vast majority of video on YouTube is "home-made", or at least not the mainstream content produced by large commercial rights holders, there's no denying that there is lots of infringing material from the big studios and broadcasters up there too.

Which brings us to YouTube's video-on-demand service, through which you can view some commercial material from the big studios. You don't buy the video, though – just access to it. The product being offered is a stream, not a download – the difference being that when you get a stream, your device is meant to throw the bits away instead of saving them. The entertainment industry likens this to a rental, rather than a purchase.

But a stream isn't precisely like a rental (I bring home a DVD, then I bring it back again), nor like a purchase (I bring home a DVD, then I keep it). It's a file transfer. When you stream a movie from YouTube, you receive a copy of it, and you can keep that copy, provided the software you're using doesn't override your wishes.

Which brings us back to where we started: unless you're running a very specific version of Google's software on your phone or tablet, you can't "rent" movies on YouTube. Google – the vendor – and the studios – the rights holders – are using copyright to control something much more profound than mere copying. In this version of copyright, making a movie gives you the right to specify what kind of device can play the movie back, and how that device must be configured.

This is as extreme as copyright gets, really. Book publishers have never told you which rooms you could read in, or what light bulbs you were allowed to use, or whether you could rebind the book or take it abroad with you. Broadcasters have never vetoed the design of radios.

The extension of copyright to "configuration right" is a profound shift in the history of technology and culture. There are lots of reasons to want to a non-stock OS on your Android phone; some versions allow you to assert fine-grained privacy controls, others add features useful to people with disabilities; others make it simpler to use cheap/free voice-over-IP for long-distance calls. There are at least as many reasons to want to redecorate and reconfigure your phone, your computer or your tablet as there are reasons to rearrange your kitchen or redecorate your bedroom.

But in order to be certain that your phone will disobey you in the event that you order it to make a prohibited copy, Google has to assert a veto over the entire operating environment. It must treat you as if you are your computer's tenant, not its owner, and make itself over as the landlord, specifying what carpet you can lay down and whether you can repaint the walls.

This novel theory of copyright is the antithesis of the "openness" that Google advertises as the unique selling proposition for Android. What's more, it has a predictable trajectory: users will discover that an ever-expanding list of requirements must be met in order to continue to "rent" copyrighted works on their Android devices. Third-party apps that defeat the anti-copying measures will be banned, and apps whose characteristics can't be verified will be locked out just to be safe. As we've seen before with these sorts of licensing deals, when rights holders have a technology partner who can be blamed for unpopular restrictions, they become quite fearless about adding new conditions to your tenancy.

After all, that's what happened the last time Google did a deal like this. Back in 2006, Google Video opened up a "store" that let you "buy" movies and TV shows, all restricted in a fashion similar to the new YouTube store. And in 2007, it shut it down and confiscated all the videos its customers had "bought," explaining that the rights holders had changed their minds about the store. Google Video customers got Google Checkout credit (a kind of virtual funny money), good for 60 days, that they could use to buy things that weren't the videos they thought they'd purchased. It was as if HMV had a tiff with Universal Studios and had to send burglars around to all their customers' houses to take their Universal movies away, leaving behind time-limited Argos gift vouchers by way of compensation.

Google looked as if it had lain down with the dogs and woken up with fleas. Now it's back in the kennel, having learned nothing. It's come a long way from its early days, when it refused to compete with other search engines by running banners or accepting paid placement – when Google's policy was "don't be evil" and "don't suck".