Great news for jailbreakers! The Library of Congress has ruled in favor for jailbreaking AND unlocking. The Associated Press writes:
“Owners of the iPhone will be able to break electronic locks on their devices in order to download applications that have not been approved by Apple. The government is making that legal under new rules announced Monday. The decision to allow the practice commonly known as “jailbreaking” is one of a handful of new exemptions from a federal law that prohibits the circumvention of technical measures that control access to copyrighted works. Every three years, the Library of Congress authorizes such exemptions to ensure that existing law does not prevent non-infringing use of copyrighted material. Another exemption will allow owners of used cell phones to break access controls on their phones in order to switch wireless carriers.
This does not mean though, that Apple will make jailbreaking easier, but they can no longer call it illegal.
Though, the question remained weather jailbreaking would void the warrenty, so Leander Kahney, a blogger with an eye or two on Apple called in and asked, they responded:“Apple’s goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience. As we’ve said before, the vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones as this can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably.
Note that they do not say that “this violates the warrenty”, but choose to say “as this CAN violate”.
So, new times ahead? – Maybe.
