US Government Makes It Legal To Jailbreak iPhones
The US government has made it legal to “jailbreak” an iPhone for “educational purposes”.
The rule was one of many exemptions from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act also known as DMCA. The Act is reviewed every three years and the government has now ruled that iPhone users can “jailbreak” their devices.
A statement by the Electronic Frontier Foundation – who filed for the exemption – read: “The first of EFF’s three successful requests clarifies the legality of cell phone ‘jailbreaking’ — software modifications that liberate iPhones and other handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker. More than a million iPhone owners are said to have “jailbroken” their handsets in order to change wireless providers or use applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes ‘App Store (App Store),’ and many more have expressed a desire to do so. But the threat of DMCA liability had previously endangered these customers and alternate applications stores.
In its reasoning in favor of EFF’s jailbreaking exemption, the Copyright Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: ‘When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”
Posted by Editor
on Jul 29 2010. Filed under Latest News, Technology.
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