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Cell Phone Owners Allowed To Break Software Locks
An anonymous reader writes "The library of congress approved many copyright exemptions today. Among the exemptions were new rules about cell phones, DVDs, and electronic books." From the article: "Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday.
Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books.
All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years.
In granting the exemption for cell phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren't able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones' underlying programs."
In the UK unlocking has not damaged the industry at all. Here you sign a contract; you can't break the contract, so therefore even if you unlock your phone, you still have to pay the remainder of your contract.
That sorts it all out in one.
You must be new.
It was quite usual to have a "SIM lock" on phones provided for free, especially with pre-paid contracts (where you pay a certain amount for a number of call minutes, can call for that amount of time, and then have to pay again to continue using the phone).
As there is no fixed-term contract with monthly payment in this construction, the only way to cover the cost of the phone is/was for the provider to hope that you buy enough call minutes.
To prevent you from changing the SIM to one of another provider (with cheaper call minutes, for example), they "had" to lock the phone to the SIM.
However, after a certain amount of time you could request a code to release this lock. Or you could use a hack and have it released immediately.
...or actually the rest of the world, it's generally neither illegal or impractical to unlock a mobile for use on any network. AFAIK, the only UK networks who still SIM lock their phones are Orange and T-Mobile (and maybe 3, I forget), and you can get most phones unlocked for about a tenner.
I did so recently with an old SonyEricsson from T-Mobile when I discovered that my Orange Windows Mobile powered PDA was useless as a phone.
The mobile market in the US seems a bit peculiar generally.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
...that the DMCA anti-circumvention laws only apply to copyrighted content, not public domain works. Still, it is illegal to distribute circumvention technology. Will we have to wait for the DVD to go the way of the projector before we can distribute libcss?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.