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."

Comments

A Lot of Confusion

[cob666]

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.