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.