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Jailtime For Jailbreaking

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-thats-not-fun dept.

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."

3 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Phone companies are evil by troll+-1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Lawsuit Phishing by Desler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Illegal uless used? by grimJester · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's legal to jailbreak your own "used" phone. This guy was jailbreaking phones by the thousands and selling them. It's still legal to jailbreak the phone you own and use, it's just illegal to unlock and sell in bulk.

    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.