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

Jailbreaking is not unlocking

[SuperKendall]

The convictions were all from people breaking phones (as in hundreds or thousands of phones) to use on different carriers. The iPhone jailbreaking (which the story summary was meant to make you think of even though no iPhones were involved in this story) does not unlock the phone for use by other carriers.

You may proceed jailbreaking as normally despite this FUD, just as many millions have already done...

Phone companies are evil

[troll -1]

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.

Re:Lawsuit Phishing

[Desler]

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.

Re:Not really jailbreaking

[Zed Pobre]

Quoting the text of the relevant exemption, with some added emphasis:

(3) Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network.

The man doing the unlocking wasn't using any of those phones to connect to a network. He was unlocking phones for resale overseas, making a profit by violating the terms of a subsidy. 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. If you find a story where someone is convicted under the DMCA for unlocking his or her own phone for personal use, then there's a story. This isn't one.

Illegal uless used?

[grimJester]

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.

Re:Well naturally...

[puto]

Yes, and you can read the original filing. The guy and his buddy bought thousands of stolen phones, and playstations, and laptops, that he knew were stolen from an undercover FBI guy over the course of few years. He and his pals are no angels. No heros. But then again, they could have posted a link to it. http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/1136.pdf