“The iPhone’s fantastic user interface is inspiring another consumer-electronics revolution: making people care about cell-phone unlocking. After my clients’ long, successful battle before the U.S. Copyright Office to exempt phone unlocking from the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, have iPhone customers won the freedom to tinker with their cool new handsets? The answer, unfortunately, is that we still don’t know,” Jennifer Granick writes for Wired.
“We won an exemption in November of 2006 that allows you to circumvent digital locks in order to access ‘computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network,'” Granick explains.
“Despite this success, the exemption does not offer blanket protection for phone unlocking, though the practice might be legal for other reasons. The problem is that the exemption protects unlockers, but it doesn’t apply to those entities that distribute unlocking tools or provide unlocking services to others,” Granick writes.
Full article here.