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iPhone jailbreaking (and all cell phone unlocking) made legal

Mon Jul 26, 5:30 pm ET

Owners of iPhones and other smartphones are one step closer towards taking

complete control of their gadgets, thanks to a new government ruling Monday on

the practice of "jailbreaking."

This weekend has seen a flurry of activity about digital rights, but the

biggest news dropped Monday morning, when the FCC announced that it had made

the controversial practice of jailbreaking your iPhone or any other cell

phone legal.

Jailbreaking the practice of unlocking a phone (and particularly an iPhone)

so it can be used on another network and/or run other applications than those

approved by Apple has technically been illegal for years. Most jailbroken

phones are used on the U.S. T-Mobile network or on overseas carriers, or are

used to run applications that Apple refuses to sell, such as Safari ad-blocking

apps, alternate keyboard layouts, or programs that change the interface to the

iPhone's SMS system and the way its icons are laid out.

While technically illegal, no one has been sued or prosecuted for the practice.

(Apple does seriously frown on the practice, and jailbreaking your phone will

still void your warranty.) It s estimated that more than a million iPhone

owners have jailbroken their handsets.

Apple fought hard against the legalization, arguing that jailbreaking was a

form of copyright violation. The FCC disagreed, saying that jailbreaking merely

enhanced the inter-operability of the phone, and was thus legitimate under

fair-use rules.

Click image to view more photos

Reuters

The upshot is that now anyone can jailbreak or otherwise unlock any cell phone

without fear of legal penalties, whether you want to install unsupported

applications or switch to another cellular carrier. Cell phone companies are of

course still free to make it difficult for you to do this and your warranty

will probably still be voided if you do but at least you won t be fined or

imprisoned if you jailbreak a handset.

In addition to the jailbreaking exemption, the FCC announced a few oth er rules

that have less sweeping applicability but are still significant:

Professors, students and documentary filmmakers are now allowed, for

noncommercial purposes, to break the copy protection measures on DVDs to be

used in classroom or other not-for-profit environments. This doesn t quite go

so far as to grant you and me the right to copy a DVD so we can watch it in two

rooms of the house, but it s now only one step away.

As was the topic in the GE ruling I wrote about, the FCC allows computer

owners to bypass dongles (hardware devices used in conjunction with software to

guarantee the correct owner is behind the keyboard) if they are no longer in

operation and can t be replaced. Dongles are rarities in consumer technology

products now, but industrial users are probably thrilled about this, as many go

missing and are now impossible to obtain.

Finally, people are now free to circumvent protection measures on video games

but, strangely, only to investigate and correct security flaws in those

games. (Another oddity: Other computer software is not part of this ruling,

just video games.)

Christopher Null is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.