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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."
People never get up in arms about something till it effects them personally. What a load of crap apple.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
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.
..... Because they could potentially make no money off the apps that are installed via jailbreaking. The rest of their reasons are just a smokescreen. Plain and simple.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
When marketing and Reality Distortion (tm) fails, call in the jackbooted thugs and sue the dissidents into submission.
This, more than anything, is why Apple will never get one coin from my wallet.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
One need only transpose Apple's arguments to the world of automobiles to recognize their absurdity. Sure, GM might tell us that, for our own safety, all servicing should be done by an authorized GM dealer using only genuine GM parts. Toyota might say that swapping your engine could reduce the reliability of your car. And Mazda could say that those who throw a supercharger on their Miatas frequently exceed the legal speed limit.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
Just because something is legal doesn't make it right.
Just because something right doesn't mean it is legal.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Of course breaking out of jail isn't legal.
What next, Apple claims that water is wet?
First off, this is coming now not because of some perceived "recent flood of iPhone cracked applications," but because the Copyright Office asked for exemption proposals to the DCMA on December 28, 2008, and the EFF filed one for jailbreaking. RTFA and RTFlegalbrief.
Second, while not effectively the same, what Apple is doing is trying to prevent jailbreaking from being ruled legal, not trying to have it ruled illegal. Being a non-lawyer, I'd at first say this is the same thing, but it is different. Just because something isn't ruled explicitly legal doesn't make it illegal, but would definitely help if some day someone wanted to sue over a jailbreak.
Engadget has a nice write-up on this from someone who has legal training if the three or four of you out there who don't just read the summary and post would like another perspective - http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/13/apple-and-eff-spar-over-iphone-jailbreaking-and-the-dmca//
So Apple is doing this to protect its income for apps on the iPhone store. That also means it is protecting the income of application *developers* who sell through the iPhone store. Sure, they could try to sell apps only for jailbroken phones, but with all the gray areas around it legally (at least in the public's eye) and with the immense ease of use of the iPhone store (click and download right now!), they would much rather go Apple's route. Right? So Apple could be covering its ass, making sure they don't get attacked from iPhone developers who have trekked through the process to make "legit" apps but could be someday losing out to jailbroken competitors.
Or else it's just about the money.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Yet another company taking the high road of suing their customers for profit!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
No, it's like bitching that Toyota will sue you if you put one in. Sure, they can rule there warranty null and void, but that's all they can do.
How many things do you sue that don't have transparency? I would bet a lot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not to nitpick (actually, yes - this is complete nitpicking), but Jailbreaking relates to running unsigned code on the phone (and giving full access to the filesystem). Unlocking is what allows people to use other carriers and SIMs.
Don't take this as flamebait... I am looking for honest answers:
How is jailbreaking an iPhone different from removing DRM from a game?
Am I wrong that Jailbreaking an iPhone simply allows you to use more applications on it?
Is this not "Fair Use?"
Is it true that there are free, non-stolen programs that wouldn't normally run on an iPhone without it being Jailbroken?
Or is Jailbreaking simply a means to running pirated iPhone apps?
No, it's like Toyota suing you if you tried to make your own NOx kit for your own use.
If monkeying around voids the warranty, fine. If monkeying around is outlawed...then only outlaws will have monkeys...er. um. wait.
THL phish sticks
The normal demographic buys the iPhone, signs the AT&T contract, and shops at iTunes and the App Store, all as Steve Jobs intended when he created the world.* Only true geeks buy iPhones to crack them, and we know that Apple doesn't care that much about the true geek community. In other words, wrong answer on the motive, although the advice to not buy an iPhone if it isn't what you want is spot on (yeah, it's only common sense, but that's getting darn rare nowadays).
Disclaimer: I have an iPhone, an iPod, and a Macintosh (it sits near one of the Ubuntu computers and gets used now and then). I do, however, generate my own reality distortion field, and don't use Jobs'.
*Yeah, I know Steve didn't really do it, and God only thinks he's Steve Jobs.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm a simple-minded person. So correct me if I am misunderstanding this situation:
Apple makes a little plastic box with an LCD screen, a battery, and a circuit board and sells it to people in retail stores. And they claim that there is some kind of law that prohibits anyone who buys this little plastic box from opening it, determining how it works, and telling other people how to make it work better. Unless, of course, they pay Apple more money beyond the money that was paid for the little plastic box at the retail store.
If this is a correct interpretation of the situation, then I have to agree that this company is delusional and that they will have a difficult time adjusting to 21st-century reality. These marketing major fantasies may have had some credibility in the 20th-century, but they are meaningless as the economy collapses.
Reality is reality. If you are exploring the circuitry and firmware of a little plastic box and someone comes up to you and tells you that you are engaged in illegal activity by doing so, politely simply to ask them to go away and something constructive with their short time on Earth. If they persist or attempt to physically prevent you from your examinations of your property (your little plastic box and circuit board), then just shoot them. Don't even give it a second thought. There are far too many people in the world, and the fewer delusional assholes running around making trouble for the rest of us, the better. They won't be missed. When even Republicans are talking about economic collapse, then you know that It's a new world out there. Anything that you can do to make the world a better place for reality-based people to live in (such as sharing iPhone knowledge and applications), to more welcome you are in the new world of the post-20th century fantasies.
Apple is about one thing: control.
I've always been a PC at heart.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
Microsoft has never been as litigious as Apple. Apple may make vastly overwhelmingly superior products to MS, but they have also always been more evil.
The only way Apple can become the new Microsoft, is if they stop suing people so much, and also make their stuff crash a lot more often. As things are right now, there's just no comparison. The two companies' suckiness are totally different.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
1) It is a decent phone (not super, but OK). Unlocked: so I can use with the carrier of my choice (t-mobile prepaid in US, others abroad).
2) It is a decent computer for some basic tasks
3) I use it as my calendar and as my phone book (no other cell phone is so nice for this)
4) A decent media player (watching movies in it on a plane is quite nice). I do not listen much to music, but I also have quite a few podcasts of "car talk" (you've gotta love these guys!).
5) Works as a decent USB drive with some additional software.
6) Can keep pictures and show them around in a decent screen
7) Every now and then I can take half-decent snapshots
8) There are some nice apps, most of the ones I have were free
So, what's the problem? I bought the device and use it as I want, I do not give a sh*t to what apple wants me to do with it...
That's just how big companies operate.
That's actually not true at all. Corporations are collections of people, and within them are coalitions and constituencies just like any other institution. Quite often, you'll have someone that wants a corporation to do something simply because they think it is cool and they really don't care about the profitability or business climate of it. They must justify some action in that regard, to cover their rears, but their mental game has already made the leap that they want to do something with the corporation just because they think it is cool.
So, when a company builds a school somewhere, sponsors a race, hires a speaker who climbed mt everest, invests in some wild technology, or any of the other things that corporations do, they do it because they think it is cool, and then they cover their rears to the shareholders and directors by inventing some elliptical story about profitability.
In fact, to many of the world's top business leaders, the whole point of the corporation is to exist to provide some social order and some revenue so that it can fund the private ambitions of its leaders. I mean, come on, do you really think if IBM funds something like a big art exhibit, they really sincerely think that doing so will yield a return? No, they do it because the board of IBM likes art, and that's that.
It's good to be a CEO.
This is my sig.
you can just not buy apple, and they can shove their locked-in product up their butt, until they get their lesson.
Read radical news here
Apple has improved it's products, but when it comes to lock-in they are still (and always have been) the kings.
Part of it is a desire for 100% control of the platform. This has allowed them to achieve things microsoft can not (I've yet to see a windows PC that suspends or hibernates as well as any mac--yes macs hibernate, it's just perfectly invisible--unplug or yank your battery while it's suspended sometime).
IBM wanted to lock down the PC the way Apple did the Mac--Apple just played more tricks. If IBM had been as successful as Apple, we would have a horrific, fragmented and expensive PC industry today, with no standard platform to count on. I'd guess even Linux would be out since Apple completely controls the BIOS and could (if they wanted) prevent other OSes from booting on it. IBM probably would have done that.
Mac products just got good enough where most of us can ignore their mis-behavior, but don't think for a second they aren't the worst company out there when it comes to locking down their products.
The Woz apparently has a jailbroken Iphone and has done it for others:
http://www.viddler.com/explore/engadget/videos/23/
they plan on going after him? Speaking of which, how much of apple does he own?
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
"Want to get sued? There's an app for that."
--
Toro }B^>
Some people program for a living. Controversial I know.
I humbly and respectfully suggest that you consider the possiblity that 20th-century laws such as the DMCA will have little if any application in the post economic-collapse world. Whatever concepts of judicial balance that these laws attempted to provide in the era before the economic collapse will be rendered meaningless in the new post-collapse realities.
I suggest that you adapt your own point-of-view of technology law to the possibility that all laws regarding software/firmware and reverse-engineering will be ignored in the not-to-distant future. If your business or career depends upon the enforcement of these laws, please consider expanding your career path strategy or business model to include the likelihood that these can and will not be enforced by the authorities in the manner that they are currently.
Unlike most juvenile Slashdot comment posters, I am being serious and not sarcastic.
The term "jailbreaking" comes from the term "chroot jail". It's not just pejorative nonsense like "piracy".
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
All of your examples are for business applications of a work purchased for personal use. And then you conclude derivative personal use is illegal. Besides being really bad logic, it ignores well-established concepts like "Fair Use". Also, it seems a bit early to declare how copyright works for digital media. Existing laws are far behind the technology, and there is very little legal precedent one way or the other.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
I buy an iphone. I own it. How can Apple tell me what to do with it after I hand over my cash and have receipt in hand?
Corporatism != Free Market
If I buy software and sell you an illegal copy, you have then purchased software illegally.
Just because you may not have known it was an illegal copy isn't necessarily a defense, just ask the RIAA. I seem to recall cases of people subscribing to those all-you-can-download 'services' that turned out to be piracy groups.
Look, it's very simple.
Saying that jail-breaking an iPhone is a violation of the DMCA, is the same thing as claiming that if I own a Blue Oyster Cult mp3, and edit the file to add even MORE COWBELL, I would be committing a DMCA violation.
"We unlock iPhones." Investigate? [Yes/No]
How does one purchase software illegally? I mean, if you've purchased it, it's not illegal.
You must be very innocent, or very stupid.
Nowadays people just torrent, but in the old days there were places where you could go in person and buy software for a fraction of its official price. Software piracy predates the Internet.
In my city (Warsaw) there was once a big marketplace on an abandoned sports stadium where people would trade in various illegal goods, like counterfeit clothes, pirated software, alcohol and cigarettes without excise tax, and even post-Soviet weapons. It wasn't the only place like this. You didn't even need an Internet connection to have the latest games. They were sold for about $3-$6 per CD.
The more common form of selling pirated software today is shady OEMs preinstalling cracked versions of Windows and other programs.
Point is, you certainly can buy software illegally, just like you can buy a stolen car.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Well, I know anecdotal evidence can be misleading, but I personally jailbreak for tethering. That and having custom backgrounds behind my springboard. The couple of other people I know who have jailbroken have done so for similar reasons.
.iso images of linux distros. The pirates may indeed be more numerous, and ruin an otherwise legit system for the rest of us.
But then, I suppose I'm just like the bittorrent user who only ever downloads
Then I believe the dev-team have stepped into the realm guarded by the DMCA dragon.
Although they might be able to use the "circumvention for reasons of interoperability" defense.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
It's a good thing the founding fathers didn't agree with this line of thinking, or we'd all be having tea and cookies at 3pm, and paying a hell of a tax on it.
... social protest - they do mention inalienable rights though. Maybe you're referring to the Declaration of Acquiescence?
It takes guts to live outside a corrupt system. I did it for a while, now I am just Joe Taxpayer. I do respect the LW though for LIVING his principles, not just yakking about them.
Last time I read the Declaration of Independence, I didn't recall seeing anything called retarded
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Judges hear the term jail breaking as some unlawful act whereby a PRISONER escapes from a place they were put, by order of another judge. This is the ultimate offense to a judge barring of course contempt of court, although it could be argued that jail breaking is a form of contempt of court, outside the court room.
They use a term like this regardless of if it means anything to programmers or sysadmins, and it hypes their case. I guarantee no judge has heard of this chroot jail business, and even upon hearing it, if both sides agree to the terminology, the judge will weigh heavily on Apple's side if this is permitted.
Being a good defense lawyer, it would be imperative to strike that term from the record as slang.
Also, IANAL but I play one on TV.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I guarantee no judge has heard of this chroot jail business, and even upon hearing it, if both sides agree to the terminology, the judge will weigh heavily on Apple's side if this is permitted.
There is but one contempt of court around here and it is this: that you think a judge would remain biased even in the face of a technical explanation.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato