Breaking The iPhone Out of Jail

It is now legal to hack your iPhone. While Apple strongly recommends against it, the U.S. Government no longer considers it an infringement of copyright laws to do so. The 1998 DCMA was a federal act that forbade the circumventing of encryption technology to copy or modify copyrighted works. The DCMA has been used, however, not only to do this, but also to keep certain technology, applications, and vendors away from the iPhone. Federal Regulators decided on Monday that there was “no basis for copyright law to assist Apple in protecting its restrictive business model.”

This means that it is now legal to hack, or jailbreak the iPhone, along with other mobile smart phones. This ruling doesn’t include the new iPad, but regulators said “the activity of an iPhone owner who modifies his or her iPhone’s firmware or operating system in order to make it interoperable with an application that Apple has not approved, but that the iPhone owner wishes to run on the iPhone fits comfortably within the four corners of fair use.”

Since the iPhone’s inception in 2007, Apple has not taken any legal action against hackers when the process was still illegal, but Apple refuses to change the warranty policy on their iPhones – the warranty will still be void if the iPhone is jailbreaked. Apple has said that the situation could be “potentially catastrophic” and that the nation’s cell phone networks could suffer attacks from iPhone hackers.

Other aspects of fair use that were previously blocked but now no longer are include unlocking iPhones to allow a change of phone carrier, allowing the cracking of video games to probe security flaws, allow the blind to unlock ebooks to allow the read-along feature, and allow professors, students, and documentary makers to break DVD encryption so film clips can be used for educational and commentary purposes.

US Gov Says It's OK To Jailbreak iPhones