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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."
Seems more likely that Mr. Majed was already in custody for previous offenses prior to the exception being enacted. As such, as far as the law is concerned, the agency holding Mr. Majed is in the right.
As far as I see the situation, as soon as the acts that 'did not cause harm to others' (quote from article) ceased to be a crime, he should have been released as he was simply being held on those charges, and prosecution had not yet commenced.
Thirty four characters live here.
I read the article and some of the comments below the article and I was amazed that there are people that equate unlocking or jailbreaking a phone to stealing intellectual property. I'm not very familiar with the wording of the DMCA exlusion that allows you to carrier unlock a phone but I did believe that it applied to a phone that you own. I somebody is charging a fee to unlock phones that clearly this doesn't fall under the DMCA exclusion as I understand it. However, if somebody were to purchase a phone for X dollars, carrer unlock it and then re-sell it for X+Y dollars then that SHOULD fall under the DMCA exlusion although it would be exploiting a loophole.
I'm still not sure how this guy ended up doing jail time and what kind of precedent that sets.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley