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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."
The "locks" Cell phone providers put on phones is completely legitamete. They buy the exclusive rights for the model they cell.
Cell Phone carriers OFTEN (almost always) heavily discount the phones, and its not uncommon for a phone to vary in pricing from carrier to carrier. Also some phones are only available under 1 provider, because of partnerships. Its outrageous that this guy has the power to waltz into an industry and essentially void multi-billion dollar contracts on the mis-guided notion of "fairness".
This guy is starting to tread into waters he obviously knows little about. This isn't about user choice, its about corporate investments. This decision on cell phones could easily lead to carriers NOT discounting phones and cell phones pricing to go through the roof. Or worse, cell phone carriers stop using CDMA or GSM, and they start creating their own breeds of signals... what a nightmare.
I say follow the money. I'll bet any of you this guy has ties to small phone carriers, or some lobbying group related to them...