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Can Apple + AT&T Shut Down iPhone Unlockers?
aalobode writes "Do Apple and AT&T have the legal right to stop hackers from selling unlocked iPhones? Under their terms, only AT&T may sell iPhones, and Apple gets a commission. When unlocked iPhones are used on other providers' networks, AT&T and hence Apple get nothing beyond what they earned on the initial sale of the hardware. Can they prohibit unlocking? Reselling? The article in Businessweek gives the for and against arguments, but leans toward the view that the hackers may have the law on their side for once."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6966600.stm
My web domain.
I bought a computer and have the right to modify it and subsequently turn around and sell it? Amazing!
...the same thing we do every night, Stimpy: try to take over the world!
What will I do with this new-found freedom?
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Wrong. Apple sells iPhones (through their website and retail locations). The phone isn't activated at the time of sale (it's done at home with iTunes). AT&T announced 146k activations when Apple announced 270k iphones sold. You do the math.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If the group that has the real iPhone unlocking software does get hit with a legit lawsuit and has to cease and desist, here's to hoping they release it for free along with the source. What's to say they can't? At that point, they aren't selling something. Maybe they could take donations? IANAL, but I think such a move would be feasible.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Collecting bonus money from activations isn't really in Apple's business model. So why should they even bother with trying to hault cracking of the iPhone? The product has already been sold. Apple made their official dollar off of it. Their interests should really die there. It's not like crackers are replacing the Apple components of the software; just defeating the AT&T parts.
Here's an article that better explains my point of view because I'm an ineloquent rambling idiot.
The game.
Not for nothing, but when the next gen iPhone comes out and it's store activation only and not home activation, you'll know why.
I guess it comes down to who owns the phone.
If when you buy an iPhone you are actually buying the ownership to the phone, you can do what the hell you like to it as its yours.
but...
If Apple are just selling a licence to use the iPhone (kinda like what Microsoft do with Windows) rather than actually selling the ownership of the iPhone itself, then they could legally and justifiably require you not to unlock it as they still own it.
If it's illegal to unlock the phone, that means I dont own it. Am I leasing it? How the hell else is it possible for me to outright purcahse something and not be able to do whetever the hell i want with it (besides to commit something that is already a crime obviously -like throwing it at someone).
If I buy a t-shirt can they make it illegal for me to use it as a rag?
Is it illegal to color the iphone with a marker? Is it illegal to open up the iphone and melt it down? Is it illegal to take the battery out of the iphone and use the large battery in a hobby RC car project? If it is, it damn well shouldn't be.
It is simple economics. The full-price of the iPhone (The physical cost of the phone+the hidden cost of being stuck to AT&T, in terms of rates, service availability, contracts...) is higher then the economical efficiency point. So what happens is black market activities. Hacking the phone to work on whatever carrier they want, so they get a better value from the phone. Now is it legal, I would think so yes Apple and AT&T are loosing money from the deal but that is the cost of doing business realizing that people are not going to play by your rules all the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Since unlocking involves some soldering and such, at least according to the account I've heard, clearly it violates the warranty. And don't forget, the iPhone has a soldered in battery; you're supposed to send the phone in after a year to take care of the battery. So, if it breaks or the battery dies, your unlocked iPhone is a very expensive paper-weight.
AT&T, sure, but why the hell would Apple want to stop people from unlocking these?
The question really is not can they, it's _should_ they? They're liable to alienate a lot of potential customers if they start cracking down on everyone. I understand that it's a losing money situation, but they might stand to lose a lot more if they start crying foul left and right about this. Either way, it seems like it'll be hard for someone to immediately get T-mobile service on their hacked iPhone, but I could be wrong - I'm looking forward to the first story of someone who goes into a T-mobile store or thereabouts and requests service for their unlocked iPhone.
brian botkiller "Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance" - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
They are already available:
m inione-specs-revealed-its-actually-got-some-juice- 261388.php
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/like-the-iphone/meizu-
However, manufacturers have managed to prevent you from modding your game console after you own it, or at least prevent other people from selling you mod chips and modding services, so now it's murky.
Wouldn't Ford love to only have you put Genuine Ford Advantage replacement parts in your car? They can't. Nor can they force you to only buy Ford approved gasoline from licensed dealers.
Yet Apple can't prevent you from putting non-iTMS purchased music into your iPod -- although that's probably because you'd never have bought the iPod if you couldn't rip your own albums and play them in it.
So what can, and cannot, Apple and AT&T do here? Besides scaring off potential unlockers, whatever the courts are willing to allow them to get away with. Clearly these days, there is no bright shining line of what's allowed, and what isn't.
Loan your new CD to your friend to listen to and the RIAA probably won't come knocking. Let him get the tracks through KaZaA and you may have an ugly time of it. Nobody knows the real rules any longer!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So why is this legal and mod chips illegal? What's so special about computer hardware when it's got an MS or Sony logo on it, as opposed to an Apple or AT&T logo?
Thomas Galvin
Usually when you "buy" a phone (in the US at least) you are getting a discount in exchange for a lengthy contract. If you don't want the contract you buy the phone outright and can do anything you want with it. This is the same issue that the auto industry had at one point. Manufacturers did not want 3-party parts sold and didn't want people to fix their own vehicles. The auto industry was pretty much shot down. Unless you are breaking a law, ie: modifying a phone to output a stronger signal, you can do as you please with any item you own. That is not to say that you can not be held liable if you do something to an item you own and it ends up damaging someone else's property or another person.
--
... so they're going to send ninjas with screwdrivers into the streets to steal people's iPhones, make hardware modifications, and then quietly return them?
We don't know for sure what Apple and AT&T's agreement is, I don't think. It's not necessarily as simple as Apple gets $500 and AT&T gets $60/month.
When you sell a mobile phone below cost, you are supposed to make up for the difference in the subscription fees. Which are mandatory to pay in the binding period even if you unlock the phone and use it on another net.
At least that is how it works with GSM phones in Denmark. You can unlock them and switch to another provider legally, but you have to continue to pay the subscription fee for the binding period. This is common, and accepted by all the service providers.
Also: The maximum binding period is six month, providers are obliged to tell the unlock key after that, and all advertisement must include the minimum total cost in the binding period (initial price plus subscription fee for six month) in order to make it easy to compare prices.
Good regulation does wonders to improve the efficiency of a market.
Mostly because in the US, the Wireless providers want to prohibit (as best they can) the customer from moving to a different service. So in the long run, if they lock the phones, that forces the customer to have to cough up more money if they want to move to a different wireless provider.
They certainly can't use the DMCA to block the unlocking. This is almost identical to the Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. case a couple years ago. Basic upshot of that ruling is that DMCA doesn't cover hacking to unlock a device for interoperability and third-party components.
If they try to sue using DMCA, they will almost certainly lose.
...is actually just pulling one of the address lines high so reads are always from a writeable rather than read-only area. If it were true that this 17-year-old were a lone hacker, I'd certainly label him precocious (this is a compliment!), but he admits to having at least three other players, and the hardware technique itself is trivial to a seasoned EE.
;-).
What he has done immensely well is put various people's work together with their agreement, including some of his own, and explain the process, then give away the method as a vehicle to sell his skills. I congratulate his not trying to hoard the method as HK hackers have done (sorry, you weren't the first!), or the iphonesimfree site. He also has fine soldering skills.
Last weekend I managed to get full control of some other piece of ARM-based consumer electronics [which I own and was not connected to any third party service, thank you lawyers]: at some stage the zero page (interrupt vectors) and interrupt handlers were mapped to ROM, but the PMTs were in an unprotected page of RAM(!), so it was fundamentally a matter of remapping the zero page and changing the SWI vector to my own code, giving me Supervisor mode. This has almost whet my appetite for a real challenge, but Apple are insulting developers by denying official support via SDKs etc, so I can't bring myself to love the iPhone enough to try to give it freedom
I love it when Europeans say, "no our phones are unlocked." Bullshit! There's a huge gray-market industry in Europe to unlock phones. My gf bought a cool Meteor Nokia phone in Ireland to get it unlocked to use on T-Mobile in the US. Bad idea... After the guy who sells phone accessories in the cart in the middle of the mall screwed up the unlock code 3x, the phone was dead. She then had to mail it to the UK to some guy who reflashes them. Vodafone-IRL phones are just as locked...
It's not true that vendor-branded phones sold in Europe are unlocked. Throw in a Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile, AT&T, BT, Meteor, etc. SIM into a locked phone from a different vendor and see how far you get...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
This product is not "merely" a phone, and the success of conventional unlocking techniques can't be relied upon indefinitely. Just look at the multitude of copy-protection (i.e. anti-interoperability) techniques that various industries are legally allowed to implement (even legitimized by laws like DMCA) and you will get some whiff of the disgusting things that Apple could put into a software update.
Sure, workarounds for these things will happen, but it won't exactly be easy, and it'll keep the users who take advantage of them at a disadvantage for purposes of (legitimate) software maintenance.
There's considerable precedent for the law allowing phone owners to use their phones however they wish, so I don't think that is worth worrying about.
If you want to worry about phones, the real issue is that you don't know what they're doing. I think that phones are going to become THE poster-child for the risks of proprietary software, in a way that makes concerns about desktop operating systems, printer drivers, etc, seem trivial and superficial. The need for open and trustworthy phones is extreme, even if Joe Schmoe doesn't get it yet -- and the government is helping us quite a bit these days, in revealing that urgency.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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v iew.ars/2 ]
As mentioned on Infinite Loop, however, it is possible to activate an iPhone without committing to AT&T's "required" 2-year service plan. By entering "999-99-9999" into the Social Security field, you will get booted into GoPhone (AT&T's prepaid phone plan that does not require a contract) mode. An equivalent voice plus data plan under GoPhone comes out to about $10 more per month than a similar plan under contract, and so this may be a very attractive option to those who aren't interested in committing to AT&T for long periods of time. Seeing as AT&T isn't subsidizing the iPhone's cost when you sign a contract (as most carriers do in order to entice customers with steep phone discounts), it doesn't seem as if there is much reason not to go this route unless you are interested in saving $10 per month and don't mind being in a contract for two years. This is the simplest way to activate the iPhone without a contract without getting into some hackery, which we will discuss in a later section. It will cost $175 to break an iPhone contract with AT&T if you choose to leave before the two years is up (although if you cancel the contract within 30-days of activation, you will not get charged an early termination fee. If you return an open-box iPhone within 14 days of purchase, Apple will charge you a 10 percent restocking fee).
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[ found here -> http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/iphone-re
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
The question is: Does it matter? The answer is, no it doesn't. If I buy hardware from someone with no signed contract alongside it, I own that hardware free and clear, and can do whatever I want with it. Including modify it, sell it, eat it, whatever.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Apple actually wants people to unlock the phone. If we assume that customers who unlock the phone for T-Mobile would not subscribe to AT&T ever, then Apple should consider it an extra phone sale (close to 50% profit margin on the hardware) instead of a lost revenue stream (shared with AT&T).
Also, unlocking the phone might void the warranty, saving Apple even more costs down the road.
While Apple might not have the legal grounds to prevent unlocking the phones, they can make the unlockers' lives a living hell. Most phones never require a firmware upgrade once they're released (and thus are feature-fixed). But the iPhone prides itself on bug-fixes and new features available via firmware upgrade. Apple probably have the rights to refuse to firmware-upgrade any unlocked phones.
Or perhaps Apple can force iTunes to refuse even syncing with unlocked phones, thus making loading music/pictures/videos a huge pain. But why would Apple want that? Any device that can access iTunes Music Store is like free money for Apple.
My bets will be if anyone is upset over the locked phones, it should be AT&T and not Apple.
violates the software license agreement, so you infringe copyright.
Game over, Phoenix Wright.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
When I was a 17 year old kid I had an unlocked Oki 900 that I used on AT&T's network. I'm pretty sure they weren't too happy that the phone could switch between five different sets of ESN/MIN pairs.
At this risk of begging for a -1 Troll mod, I really, REALLY hope this doesn't happen. The rich and powerful enjoy their property, and if you think you're going to give that up because the "rabble" beneath them has de facto lost faith in the concept of property, you're sadly mistaken.
Rather, this sounds like an argument for pushing people into conformity, while they are robbed behind your backs. Convince people that property doesn't exist, and it becomes easy to take it away from them. While the masses will be content with a minimum level of existence - but don't you dare strive for more! - the few will still enjoy the excesses in life. The abolition of property will occur only at the level of appearance, but to sate the greed of those with power, will continue to exist behind the scenes. (Think Al Gore and his power-hungry estates...)
If society moves in the direction you sense, it will imply a step back towards the Dark Ages, and a return to a feudalistic society. Of course, if the great mass simply desires serfdom...
Socialism, FYI, is a poor, poor application of Marxism. My take on Marx is that he believes in and advances the idea that individuals to be the direct owners of their creative forces, i.e. labor. Marxism, in a sense, is a fundamental SUPPORTER of property rights - you own your work, and no one else can or should exploit that! Every management salary that gets paid is, in a sense, benefiting in part from the productive labor beneath them. To simplify, a worker may give $100,000 of annual value to a company, but they actually receive $50,000 in pay, while his manager gains some benefit, as does the owner/stockholders.
In order for such a structure to exist, it does become apparent that the idea of a company most be rethought, that private ownership is in some sense anathema to Marx, because the idea of an owner that takes no benefit for himself makes no sense. Ownership at the level of the worker would imply some sort of management by election, a sort of executiveless entity that makes decisions through the majority will of the collective. Again, though, in a sense this is the same spirit that gave birth to America, and this concept simply means the democratization of the corporate world. However, the concept of property remains intact in that people own their labor, and the results of that labor. In fact, the concept of property might be brought into further clarity and focus if thought of this way. The change is a move from the idea of property as the apprehension of an external physical object, to the idea of property as an externality with its source found within the forces of the productive individual. Property as external object would still exist, but would be intrinsically tied to the individual. I would argue this is as relevant to physical things as it is to information.
That's the problem with American consumerism, really. It's not that we consume too much. It's that we've created this schism between property and self, instead of having an integrated view where property extends from my personal productivity and is an extension of myself. But then, I come back full circle, because I think the richest and most successful do have this viewpoint. Information does pose a problem, in that information is incredibly difficult to exploit when information can be transfered as easily as it can today. But consider - I have a piece of information on nuclear engineering because I found it on Google OR I have a piece of information because I studied nuclear physics for many years, became intimately familiar with the rules and laws that govern the field, and understand that information in an almost epiphanal quasi-enlightenment. The value of information is determined by the holder. And THAT moves towards what is for some a very uncomfortable alliance between knowledge and a Marxist view of labor/property...
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
IMO the legal right of Apple or AT&T to stop someone selling unlocking software will probably become a moot point, simply because if a company can do it, eventually some cracker somewhere will create a freely distributable version and release it onto p2p. Once that happens the only thing can Apple can do is update the firmware, which I would guess they have every right to do if they choose to.
In a nutshell, I think that allowing it to be unlocked would be beneficial to Apple's sales, but perhaps may cause (possible legal) problems in their relationship with AT&T.
If the history of iTunes is any guide, Apple will continue to roll out new measures that are strong enough to keep unlocking a niche issue, but won't waste time, money, and consumer goodwill by trying to lock the thing down completely. The geohot hack doesn't bother Apple or AT&T at all. Most people won't open their phone and start tinkering with the hardware. If somebody comes out with a pure-software hack that can be loaded and run with only a couple mouse clicks, Apple will probably take steps to make that harder. But in the long run, fighting to prevent hacks is a losing proposition, and Apple knows it.
The best way for Apple and AT&T to stop people from unlocking their phones is to develop software-as-a-service products that are only supported by the AT&T network. Maybe that means seamless integration between the AT&T network and the iTunes store, maybe it means streaming music & video that automagically syncs to your desktop computer's iTunes library, or maybe it means things none of us have even considered yet. Apple's whole business strategy revolves around the idea that people will pay for better quality, though.
If 'unlocking the iPhone' means 'keeping all the really good features of the iPhone and ditching the expensive suck factor of AT&T service', then unlocking will rule no matter what Apple and AT&T do. If 'unlocking the iPhone' means 'I ditched AT&T, but lost a bunch of cool features in the process', then only a handful of people will bother.
There are two main reasons Apple won't try to play the lock-in card.
First, Apple doesn't own enough of the cellphone market to have a 'lock' on anything. Their stated goal is to own 1% of the smartphone market by the end of 2008. Meanwhile, Nokia's goal is to own 40% of that same market. Apple isn't in a position to get pushy about anything right now. All that will do is alienate customers, and alienating customers doesn't help them increase their market share.
Second, Apple doesn't compete by locking out alternatives. It competes by offering the best package it can, and trusting consumers to think the package is worth the price.
Since an Israeli team unblocked the iPhone, obstructing this hack would be an act of anti-Semitism.
There's already been a software unlock produced from the fruits of the hardware one. It's not at all difficult to unlock an iPhone now.
+++ATH0