Thursday, August 26, 2010

Unlocking Apple's iPhone is legal, ethical, and just plain fun. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

Unlocking Apple's iPhone is legal, ethical, and just plain fun. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine
Part of the copyright code, Section 1201 of the famous Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, makes it illegal to break digital locks to get at copyrighted works. But that doesn't make unlockers criminals. The reason is an explicit exemption for personal unlocking issued by the librarian of Congress in 2006. As the librarian wrote, the locks "are used by wireless carriers to limit the ability of subscribers to switch to other carriers, a business decision that has nothing whatsoever to do with the interests protected by copyright." If that's good enough for the librarian of Congress, that's good enough for me

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