JailBreak Prevails!

This news is old but it's still a breath taking to say that last July, 26, 2010 the US Government has legalized software jailbreaking and unlocking, finally bringing the Americans on par with their oversea counterparts who’ve always been able to legally escape clutches of their phone makers and carriers. Meaning everyone will be able to run sanctioned apps on their iDevices or use the phone with another carrier.

It’s one of a “handful of new exemptions” from a 1998 federal law put in place basically in order to protect access to copyrighted works, the news gathering organization explained:

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.

Au contraire, running third-party apps that crack a phone’s baseband software is no longer a big no-no. This means anyone can now unlock their phone and switch carriers. Even more interesting, other exemptions allow cracking technical protections on video games to “investigate or correct security flaws” and bypassing security dongles if ones breaks and can’t be replaced.

But it doesn't stop there: Now it's perfectly legal to crack those dreaded DVD copy-protection schemes in order to rip the clips and use them for education, criticism, commentary, and noncommercial videos, but sadly it's only limited to college professors, film students, and documentary filmmakers.