In Ruling on iPhones, Apple Loses a Bit of Its Grip [New York Times]
In an interesting twist of copyright law, the Library of Congress issued a ruling yesterday that freed those who unlocked the walled garden of applications on their Apple iPhones from violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Congress gave the Library of Congress the power to issue rulings on specific exceptions to the DMCA, and the Electronic Freedom Foundation asked the Library to grant the exemption to so-called "jailbroken" phones.
Users of the iPhone are familiar with the device's security that limits the ability to install applications from approved programs at Apple's App Store. A tiny minority of iPhone users remove those security protocols - jailbreaking their phones - to install unapproved applications. While such activity voids the device warranty and opens the device up to potentially malicious software, it now is no longer a violation of U.S. copyright law based on yesterday's ruling.
It will be noteworthy whether the ruling increases the number of users that decide to jailbreak their phone. With thousands of applications available on the App Store, the incentive to jailbreak an iPhone is fairly limited. Yesterday's ruling applies to all mobile phones operating systems, though the iPhone is by far the device with the largest number of users seeking to remove the controls that lock its operating system.
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