iPhone Jailbreaking, Unlocking Is Now Legal

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Great news for all the iphone users who would like to jailbreak their devices or had already jailbreaked the same. The US Library Congress has come up with a great news for all the jailbreakers and unlockers, After a lot of hard work and mountains of paperwork, jailbreaking your iPhone is now explicitly a permitted fair use under the DMCA.

Yes, they made changes in some copyright laws (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA) to legally allow jailbreaking and unlocking of smartphones.

WASHINGTON — Owners of the iPhone will be able to legally unlock their devices so they can run software applications that haven’t been approved by Apple Inc., according to new government rules announced Monday.

The decision to allow the practice commonly known as “jailbreaking” is one of a handful of new exemptions from a 1998 federal law that prohibits people from bypassing technical measures that companies put on their products to prevent unauthorized uses. The Library of Congress, which oversees the Copyright Office, reviews and authorizes exemptions every three years to ensure that the law does not prevent certain non-infringing uses of copyright-protected material.

However this won’t stop Apple from continuing its practice of disabling jailbroken phones with software upgrades. That means owners of such phones might not be able to take advantage of software improvements, and they still run the risk of voiding their warranty.

You can read more on this news here and here