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Jailtime For Jailbreaking
An anonymous reader writes "Remember how the Librarian of Congress announced that jailbreaking your phone was legal and not a violation of the DMCA? Yeah, well, tell that to Mohamad Majed, who has already spent over a year in jail and has now been pressured into pleading guilty to criminal DMCA violations for jailbreaking phones for use on other carriers."
If they controlled the Internet you'd buy your computer from your ISP and it wouldn't work with any other ISP, your Internet bill would list every website you went to, out-of-state websites would be billed at a higher rate (except for nights and weekends). The current model for phone networks is an overpriced relic of the last century.
Except that what he was doing does not fall under the exemption. The exemption was that you can jailbreak YOUR OWN phone. This is the same reason why it's legal to break CSS encyption on DVD to use copyrighted clips in fair use works but it is not legal for someone to run a business where by they are stripping CSS off of ripped DVDs and then selling those unencrypted discs.
Both Techdirt and the submitter seem to have reading comprehension problems.
Is it illegal to jailbreak a phone if you haven't used it? Illegal to jailbreak more than one phone? Illegal to sell a phone after you jailbreak it? Illegal only if two or more of the above?
I think you have a case of the ole "illegal to profit from someone else's work" mindset.
>>>this idiot pleaded guilty, so you can't really blame anyone but him.
The Supreme Court has ruled that your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent is still a protected right, if it can be demonstrated that the person was never informed of that right. They also stated that oftentimes completely-innocent people will plead guilty to a crime they never committed, so that alone is not enough evidence to convict.
Bottom Line:
Keep your mouth shut. I've had people tell me, "Oh well if you were innocent why wouldn't you cooperate with the police and let them see inside your trunk, or home?" Answer: Because innocent people have been sent to prison. Better to not volunteer anything.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
He was unlocking phones for resale overseas, making a profit by violating the terms of a subsidy.
There were no terms - it's a prepaid phone, no contract was signed. The worst that could happen is they declare him in violation of their terms of service (and thus stop providing said service), but I really don't think that'd be an issue to him...
The exemption doesn't cover this, and you probably don't want it to cover this, assuming you still want to be able to buy phones at less than full market price.
It makes little difference if the end user can still legally unlock their phone - the carriers can't rely on the law to back up their technical measures, and that's the way it should be. If you want to enforce terms after the initial sale, do so with a contract (as the pay monthly services already do).
He was running his business to the letter of the law. Tracfone was running theirs on a gamble that the subsidised phones would pay for themselves. Majed owned the phones and was well within his rights to do what he liked with them - dump them in the ocean, if he wanted - with no regard to repaying Tracfone's subsidy; if they'd wanted the terms to be different, a simple contract at the time of sale would've solved all their problems (and made Majed's business immediately untenable by virtue of breaching that contract).
Sorry but I gotta call bullshit. You think the average Joe is gonna have the skills to jailbreak? Nope, they'd have to bring it to someone like me, just like they bring their desktops and laptops, and I ain't doing jack for free.
This is just an end run around the "jailbreaking is okay" exception, by making sure those that have the skills have no reason to share those skills. Imagine what a shitfit everyone would have if they said only yourself or authorized licensed laptop centers were allowed to work on your laptop? The average Joe is scared to go into Windows Control Panel, he sure as hell ain't doing root hacking. This is just a way to make sure nobody can actually use that exception, and considering how "corporation yay!" our government has become this really doesn't surprise me.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.