Jailbreak blir lagligt i USA

Owners of the iPhone will be able to break electronic locks on their devices in order to download applications that have not been approved by Apple. The government is making that legal under new rules announced Monday.

The decision to allow the practice commonly known as "jailbreaking" is one of a handful of new exemptions from a federal law that prohibits the circumvention of technical measures that control access to copyrighted works.

The most surprising ruling was on "jailbreaking" one's phone (exemption number two), replacing the company-provided operating system with a hacked version that has fewer limitations. Make no mistake: this was all about Apple. And Apple lost.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that jailbreaking one's iPhone should be allowed, even though it required one to bypass some DRM and then to reuse a small bit of Apple's copyright firmware code. Apple showed up at the hearings to say, in numerous ways, that the idea was terrible, ridiculous, and illegal. In large part, that was because the limit on jailbreaking was needed to preserve Apple's controlled ecosystem, which the company said was of great value to consumers.

That might be true, the Register agreed, but what did it have to do with copyright?

"Apple is not concerned that the practice of jailbreaking will displace sales of its firmware or of iPhones," wrote the Register, explaining her thinking by running through the "four factors" of the fair use test. "Indeed, since one cannot engage in that practice unless one has acquired an iPhone, it would be difficult to make that argument. Rather, the harm that Apple fears is harm to its reputation. Apple is concerned that jailbreaking will breach the integrity of the iPhone's ecosystem. The Register concludes that such alleged adverse effects are not in the nature of the harm that the fourth fair use factor is intended to address."

And the Register concluded that a jailbroken phone used "fewer than 50 bytes of code out of more than 8 million bytes, or approximately 1/160,000 of the copyrighted work as a whole. Where the alleged infringement consists of the making of an unauthorized derivative work, and the only modifications are so de minimis, the fact that iPhone users are using almost the entire iPhone firmware for the purpose for which it was provided to them by Apple undermines the significance" of Apple's argument.

The conclusion is sure to irritate Steve Jobs: "On balance, the Register concludes that when one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses."

This time, the Library went (comparatively) nuts, allowing widespread bypassing of the CSS encryption on DVDs, declaring iPhone jailbreaking to be "fair use," and letting consumers crack their legally purchased e-books in order to have them read aloud by computers.

At it's core, jailbreaking is not an app, it's not Cydia, it's one simple thing - having unrestricted write access to your device. In more technical terms, it's having root access. In the Android scene, it's actually called rooting your device.

So what's the big deal you ask? Maybe you're not a hacker, or even a "hobbyist" or "enthusiast" - that's fine. Maybe you don't care about having any access at all to your device - it does everything you need already. You don't want to jailbreak, and you never will. That's fine, and for many, true. My iPhone 4 isn't jailbroken yet, and it's been handling itself just fine - of course there's tons of jailbreak apps I miss (Notifier, Tlert, MyWi, WinterBoard, iFile, and OpenSSH/SSL being some of the biggest). But if I /want/ to modify my device, which I have purchased and own outright, for completely legal activities, enhancing the original purpose of the device (a "smartphone") - it should be legal. Whether I do so or not should remain wholly my choice.

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Many people seem to associate "jailbreaking" with "iPhone piracy." This is a flawed view. Piracy IS illegal, has been clearly defined as such legally for years, and is not at all synonymous with jailbreaking. Take ModMyi.com as a case study - we have over 675,000 members, the vast majority of whom have jailbroken one or more iDevices, and we strictly forbid any talk, linking, or mention of pirated apps. I personally have had a jailbroken iPhone longer than nearly anyone here (ModMyi actually created the first ever iPhone "theme"), and I have never pirated an iPhone app. It has always been our standpoint piracy is 100% illegal, and is rude on top of that. Devs spend days and weeks building $2 and $5 apps - if you want them enough to install them, you should pay for them.