US Copyright Office To Define The State of iPhone Jailbreak

Any day now the U.S Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress are due to rule whether the iPhone jailbreaking should be exempted from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The scoop on whats going on all started about eighteen months ago when the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked regulators to add jailbreaking to a list of explicit exemptions to the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. For those of you who don't already know, jailbreaking is when you hack the phone's OS to allow it to run any app on the phone, including apps not authorized by Apple. When last reviewed three years ago, regulators approved six exemptions, including the ability to unlock your phone to change carriers. Apple and it's very closed business model has been enjoying since 2007, when the iPhone debuted. Apple says its unlawful to jailbreak and not take legal action against the millions who have jailbroken their phones and used the underground app store, Cydia. The company doesn't deny tha the closed marketplace is what made the success of the iPhone possible, and sold more than three billion apps.

The EEF's Fred von Lohmann said that allowing jailbreaking world create an app gold rush, and bring the unauthorized app market to the mainstream. So what's this all about? Every three years, regulators look into proposed exemptions to the DMCA, passed in 1998. The act would forbid circumventing encryption technology to copy or modify copyrighted works. In this case, Apple says the DMCA protects the encryption built into the bootloader that starts up the iPhone OS operating system. Apple declined to be interviewed for the story but in an April security bulletin, it said "Unauthorized modification of iPhone OS has been a major source of instability, disruption fo services, and other issues."

In the video below, von Lohmann explains why EFF made the jailbreaking request to government regulators:

The video below is Threat Levels foolproof demonstration of jailbreaking: