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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.
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.
It's been going like this for a while, just look at their business practices, the only thing they have going for them is that they're cool.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
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.
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
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.
Begins!? Apple is the only major vendor to have been actively boycotted by the FSF for their efforts to obstruct freedom, force lock-in and undermine competition. Even Microsoft[*] hasn't managed to reach that high water mark. Of course, Apple has come a long way since then, and many of our younger readers may not even remember what they were like at their worst. ("Look-and-Feel" anyone?) Still, those of us who remember the bad old Apple keep a wary eye on the new-and-(mostly-)improved Apple.
[*] FSF members may not run MS OSes, but they do actively support building software to run under MS OSes, and will even accept patches to help their software run better on MS OSes.
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
Apple has long been far WORSE than MS. The difference, of course, is that your life is extremely unlikely to be impacted by avoiding Apple's products.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
I know slashdot hivemind loves to hate apple and I myself am not a fan of this whole iphone lock-in crap (I won't buy one just because they make you sign a $70/mo. contract with AT&T & they won't let you officially tether it), but just to make this discussion a little more even-handed, I'll point out a couple of cases where Apple has "played nice" with open source.
Exhibit A: CUPS. Apple owns it. Nothing bad has happened. In fact it has worked so well that I've been using free gutenberg printer drivers for a laser printer that Apple stopped supporting in Leopard. Works fine.
Exhibit B: Webkit. Apple forked khtml and now there are several browsers for windows, linux browsers are based off it. Nothing bad has happened, and I think we can all agree that webkit is a darn fast browser engine.
Exhibit C: Darwin is open source. That's right, the OS X operating system is open source and released by Apple. Granted, the window manager (quartz) is not, nor are a lot of the apps (like the Finder), but you can always use X11, which btw, apple provides also.
So, it's a little disingenuous to portray Apple as completely proprietary: How many open source projects does Microsoft participate in? Yes I agree that Apple does try to lock you into their hardware, and that sucks, but they're not being completely evil.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
"Want to get sued? There's an app for that."
--
Toro }B^>
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
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.
Much of Apple's webkit enhancements are now proprietary and not submitted back. ⦠Further, the little they do submit back has given them leverage to control the package against public interest: I.e. Webkit rejected support for Ogg/Theora+Vorbis citing Apple. (Apple is a holder of MPEG LA licensed patents).
Go check the gcc mailing list archives. No apple employee is permitted to come in contact with any GPLv3 licensed source code, they had to unsubscribe from GCC-patches mailing lists and have requests people not send patches to the main gcc mailing list.
Apple is an exploiter of free software. Sometimes giving back is in their interest, but don't let that mislead you into thinking that they are a supporter.
I still remember well the 'special' tools required to open a Mac's case.
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
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