iPhone jailbreaking (and all cell phone unlocking) made legal [telecom]

The FCC has decided to allow (with some restrictions - see whole article) the Smartphones to be legally "jailbroken" - unlocking of a Smartphone to be operated on another carriers system and in the case of the Apple iPhone, be able to run apps (applications) which Apple has not approved.

The complete article is found at:

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Also note in the article some additional "digital rights" changes which are almost tantamount (according to the article) to allowing the individual purchaser of a DVD to "legally" make a copy of it - the actual permission was granted to Professors, students and documentary filmmakers for non-commercial purposes to break the copy-protection measures on DVD's. But isn't everyone a "student" of the art of film viewing?

John Stahl Aljon Enterprises Data/Telephony Consultant

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Bill Horne Moderator

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the FCC.* It's actually from the copyright office, via the Librarian of Congress since the copyright office is part of the LoC.

There is a part of the copyright law against breaking software access controls which has a bunch of exceptions, with the details of the exceptions to be interpreted by the copyright office. This recent decision says that jailbreaking your phone for the purpose of connecting to another legitimate network is one of the exceptions.

Cracking DVDs to use snippets in news reports is another exception. It also says you can crack videogames to test for security flaws, crack dongle code if nobody sells the dongle any more, and crack some ebooks for use with screen readers.

The actual realease is here:

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As others have noted, this does not affect any contracts you may have agreed to when you activated your iPhone.

R's, John

- Anyone who'd read the article would know that.