Geek Life

For those of you who have an iPhone, I shall say unto thee in the immortal words of Professor Farnsworth, “Good news!”  According to Wired magazine, federal regulators have made the official pronouncement that it is legal to hack or “jail break” the Apple iPhone. Put simply, jail breaking is hacking into the OS of the phone (for those of us over the age of 25, isn’t it odd to think of a phone having an operating system?) and formatting it so that it can run a multitude of unofficial apps. Almost two years ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked legislators to add the hacking of a phone’s OS to a list of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions.

For Apple, this means the potential loss of their closed business model, which they have been profiting from since the debut of the iPhone, and its wonderful app running capabilities, in 2007. Apple has maintained that jail breaking their phones is a violation of law, but they had yet to take action against the millions of users who had already done so. They claim that it is this closed business model which allowed the iPhone to become the success that it is, along with selling over 3 billion apps. They also ascertain that this decision will leave the nation’s cell phone networks to “catastrophic” acts of cyber terrorism by hackers armed with their mighty iPhones.

Their pleas were all for naught however, as the Library of Congress, along with the Copyright Office, came to the decision that “while a copyright owner might try to restrict the programs that can be run on a particular OS, copyright law is not the vehicle for imposition of such restrictions.” The same decision was reached in another case which was in regards to “dongles,” a very odd word which refers to the digital keys which grant access to the meat of a piece of software.

What this all boils down to, in the final analysis, is that Apple will continue to not arrest you should you choose to hack your iPhone and install apps which haven’t been officially licensed by them. They will not, however, continue to cover a hacked phone under the warranty; which is well within their rights as a provider of a piece of technology. If a user decides to make changes to their piece of equipment which is against the recommendations of the manufacturer, it is the prerogative of said company to no longer offer protection, or warranty on their product. The only real thing to come out of this litigation, is that Apple can’t have you arrested for downloading apps from Cydia, or using Rock Your Phone to create a Wi-Fi hotspot.

You’ll have to excuse me now; I’m going down to Folsom. Gotta see all of my iPhone buddies and let them know their gettin’ outta there soon.

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