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I too was going to give Thom a little good natured ribbing for this being his first post in a while but you beat me to the punch.

It's no surprise that Thom jumped at the opportunity to "blast" Apple for their desire to control the hardware that runs their software and celebrate the Library of Congress' ruling.

Like others here, I don't think the Library of Congress' decision will make much difference in the real world.

I don't know of a single case where Apple ever "broke down the doors" of a hacker who hacked their phone and its certainly within Apple's right to continue to make the process difficult, something the LOC didn't say Apple or another company couldn't continue to do.

But despite the impression others have regarding Apple's "evil intentions" I've always thought the license agreements, the efforts to make it difficult to hack their phones, hardware, operating system, etc. had more to do with product liability.

For example if they didn't have these EULAs and systems in place what's to stop a hacker from seeking compensation for "bricking" their netbook for example, or a company who installed OS X on non-Apple hardware and as a result lost millions of dollars in valuable data, or a techie claiming "lost productivity" because he'd hacked his iPhone and lost a big contract. Or imagine a hacker bringing AT&T's network to a halt due to a poorly written application or hack.

With all that said, I'm actually pleased with the LOC's ruling as it always feels a little "dirty" when bending the rules of an EULA and I've done so, self admittedly. At least hackers now can risk "bricking" their iPhone legally!

But be careful my fellow hackers...if you bring down the "network", brick your phone, lose data, or cause irreparable harm to your hardware, software, data or your body or that of someone else's, YOU will be held liable, criminally or civilly, not our friends at Apple or our other favorite technology companies.

I agree that although this is big news, cause for celebration, and a blow to Apple's hegemony, it's not going to have much real-world impact, because the geniuses who are out these figuring out the jailbreaks would do it whether it was illegal in the US or not. This doesn't compel Apple to make jaibreaking easy, nor does it particularly clarify the awkward instance where you take your jailbroken and broken iPhone into the Apple store to be fixed under warranty.

Really the main thing that this does is give people in the US with jailbroken iPhones a little more moral high ground because they're not actually taking part in a semi-legal activity anymore.

Well I for one have both enjoyed the slow pace here in your absence, and missed your unique perspective on all things tech. I hope you're able to stay with the site for a while yet, and still pursue your college life and career.

I'll miss your posts, Thom.

The site has been darn near dead the last few weeks.

So true... OSNews without Thom's articles kind of sucks, really. It went from a daily visit to "eh, I don't really care..." and a half a week passes before I bother coming back. And when I do, there's maybe two articles of interest... and even those are lacking.

They'll probably void your warranty and refuse to repair it.

Yes, but then 'warranty laws' are pretty clear...

If the modification didn't cause the problem, the problem is still covered under warranty.

So, unless jail-breaking in and of itself caused the issue, the warranty must be honored.

--The loon

Nope.

You'll require jail breaking if you copy those... :p

Excellent point; I didn't think about it from the standpoint of those that were sharing the information. I stand corrected.

One should care, since in general companies build their policies around the legal climate. The more relevant and fare laws are, the less room is there for Apple and the like to pressure users with their power hungry policies.

Edited 2010-07-26 18:56 UTC

I do. It's a step in the rarely seen "sane" direction for US IP law.

Apple flat out called it illegal. Motorola limits what you can do using the technology, not the law. The LOC only said it wasn't legal, not that it was a right to do. Motorola will still continue locking and encrypting the boot loader and making life generally difficult for 3rd party ROM users on their phones.

Again, how is this a "Loss" for Apple?? Or will you continue to cloud what's really happened here vs blog banter?

Apple loses control over the iOS platform and can't lean on people using the law. This means that it is a potential loss of sales through the iTunes store due to the alternative stores such as Cydia and Iphonexe.

There, no clouding.

Possibly, but Apple's the only one who said it is illegal. Other companies settle for voiding your warranty, which is the sane option. It's not like it's illegal to modify your Ford or B&O stereo or Yamaha motorcycle etc (as long as it's within the applicable law). There's no reason IT has to be different in this regard.

Rubbish. Software is software. Changing the software doesn’t void the warranty. At most they can ask you to reformat the device before they will repair it.

I'm guessing you're blissfully unaware of the reality that there are hardware designs where bugs in software can cause things to self-destruct by accident, as it only takes a little access in the wrong memory addresses to cause hardware-fatal issues. Look it up: there's a lot of devices that have that issue, and have in the past. I'm not aware of any currently being sold, but... perhaps that's because they're not talked about, or people don't often hack things enough to have that become well-known. I distinctly remember having to have my hand at the ready to turn my CRT monitor off very quickly when I was testing various resolutions for X Windows installations, or Windows resolution tests (before XP). Yup, I could have destroyed my monitor via software, and my monitor wasn't remotely unique in that.

If hardware came in for repair and it was something along the lines of fatal hardware death somehow that's brought about by software, they'd be fully in their right to tell you to go jump in a lake, it's not their fault, it's yours!

And even without fatal hardware issues like that, without the developer having full control over software, if modified software is running, it may make the device not work as designed, and make someone think the hardware has failed, when it's really just buggy software: why should a manufacturer have to warrant against that?

Agreed. Apple *obviously* has no obligation *whatsoever* to service jailbroken phones.

And this is likely to be their response, which we should be able to see quite soon. The EULA, or whatever their agreement is called, would be easily changed with a few of those law-related 100 lines sentences written from the company's lawyers. So it will be up to the users.
I'm going a little offtopic now, but I'm not really much into Apple's stuff, so let me ask : is it true that some interoperability is broken in Apple -> other OSes direction ? For example, I want to send you a picture from my Nokia/SE/Motorola/otherPhone via Bluetooth, but Apple won't accept that ? I heard that, but I can't confirm if this is true. So, if yes, would jailing into the device can enable users to connect to each other, or there are hardware limitations ?

My question was how is it a "Big Loss for Apple" [specifically]? The explicit terms of this [law] doesn't single one company out. It will affect any phone maker.

They play a pretty major role in determining what constitutes fair use

Since when does a Ministry have anything to do with Justice? Different countries call their government units different things.

Since when does a library have anything to do with sharing of code located on disk by unrelated programs?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_library#Shared_libraries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress

Seriously, next time, look up what the subject actually is before making a post like this. It only makes you look bad when you post questions like that in an environment such as this.

That's a good point.

Sure, the wikipedia link says the LOC serves "as the base for the United States Copyright Office." But this is essentially a legal decision.

I can't remember hearing of the Library of Congress handing down a legal decision before. It at least stands out as not being ordinary.

The heartbreak is that the idiots that you're lampooning won't "get" your satire even if you explained it to them for a million years.

Umm... the "big evil government" made the DMCA in the first place. Now they've reduced its scope. It's unusual for laws to be relaxed and civil liberties expanded, but completely consistent with a deregulatory approach.

It repeats every month u know =)

I have the entire series digitally on my media centre. I'm watching it for the third time. In like 6 months.

Well, it prevents them from going after people simply for jailbreaking, which is what they can currently threaten.

I'm sure Apple won't stop, but they'll have to change their song from 'jailbreaking is illegal' to 'these people are obviously downloading illegal content/hacking wireless base towers/the mafia'. And probably continue to throw up as many hurdles as they can to make jailbreaking unpalatable.

I suspect this only puts jailbreaking in the same category as bittorrent. The concept itself is not illegal, but what people do with it, might be. Think of the children!

and your free to break it the way you want, but that shouldn't be covered by the warranty.