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Apple Claims That Jail-Breaking Is Illegal
rmav writes "Apple has finally made a statement about jail-breaking. They try to sell the idea that it is a copyright infringement and DMCA violation. This, despite the fact (as the linked article states) that courts have ruled that copying software while reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software. I cannot help but think that the recent flood of iPhone cracked applications is responsible for this. Before that, Apple was quietly ignoring the jailbreak scene. Now, I suppose that in the future we may only install extra applications on our iPhones as ad hoc installs using the SDK, and if we want turn-by-turn directions, tethering, and the like, we have to compile these apps by ourselves? Maybe we should go and download the cydia source code and see what we can do with it."
Apple can claim whatever they want, and can sue whoever they want for DMCA violations. C&D's are freely distributable.
Whether or not that claim has the weight of law is up to a judge, not a marketing director.
Copyright (it least in it's original form) governed the reproduction and distribution only. If you purchase a legally produced copy of the work, then it is then yours to do with as you see fit. Saying that you can't modify software that you've legally purchased is akin to saying you can't doodle in the margins of a book you bought. And no, just because the publisher decided to print "THOU SHALT NOT DOODLE IN THYN BOOK." on the first page doesn't change anything.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Phones run software. Software is copyrighted. Modifying the software - that is, creating a derivative work - is unauthorized and may well represent a breach of copyright law.
No. Let me help:
Distributing an unauthorized derivative work may well represent a breach of copyright law.
First sale law dictates that I am free to make whatever modifications I like to any software I've bought. The EULA attempts to form a contract with the user, so the actual legal question (IANAL but come on, we've been discussing this with the assistance of the occasional lawyer for many years now) is whether a EULA is binding. My understanding is that this is still very much up in the air. Right now it is, I believe, the fulcrum upon which the Apple vs. Psystar case rests. I think most of us understand that you're not permitted to redistribute someone else's copyrighted material absent the express permission to do so (which is why the GPL only grants freedoms and does not restrict them - at least as compared to unlicensed copyrighted media, if not material released into the public domain. But there I go on a tangent again.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"