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Is It Legal To Unlock The iPhone?
consumerist.com — The conclusion is that Apple's ban on unlocking is more about Apple (and AT&T?) unfairly controlling the market and preventing competition than it is about protecting copyrighted software and works —in which case, it's not a defensible business practice.
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- aerogant, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4It's not illegal to write software, it is the distribution of software that has always been legally questionable. But even that, if some one creates software that modifies other software, they could just as easily explain to you in plain english how to do it yourself, which means it is not illegal to tell some one how to do something.
- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -1/+9Beating the dead horse...
NO, it is NOT illegal to unlock any phone. NO, Apple does NOT have to make it easy for you to do, there are no laws that say "phone unlocking should be provided by the company". YES the DMCA prevents you from sharing the information on how to do it in a non-academic setting in the United States, but NO the DCMA does NOT prohibit you from developing a crack for any technologies that may lock the phone. - 5hocker, on 10/10/2007, -2/+8To save some time:
"YES"- llsethj, on 10/10/2007, -2/+1seems so stupid - why are people trumpeting Apple's decision to lock the iPhone? IT was a hoorible decision for consumers. Why do the consumers back them up? Oh because they were stupid enough to go with the AT&T plan. Kinda like some recovering alcoholics think everyone who drinks needs help
- OS2Guy, on 10/10/2007, -6/+1* A hacked iPhone is going to cost you a LOT more money to use on the Internet - * A hacked iPhone (carrier change) is going to cost you a LOT more money to use on another carrier, if you can even get it to work (I have yet to see a carrier-switched iPhone in the wild) - * A hacked iPhone is not going to survive a single update from an iTunes sync without either "unhacking" (restoring the base image) or turning the phone (cell carrier decoupling) into a useless but attractive lump of technology. - * At this point, developing applications using the iPhone's native Cocoa is not a viable development platform. You have no audience. Your customers would need to be well above the power-user level in order to simply install your software. Your customers would violate their warranty and suffer all three of the previously listed consequences to hacking the phone just to run your software. It just ain't gonna happen.
- cave, on 10/10/2007, -3/+2FUD much?
- crazybugger, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Who is going to stop me!
- foxhaze, on 10/10/2007, -2/+2Steve Jobs.
- KevenM, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1nobody's going to stop you, just don't go crying to Apple if you can't hack your way out of it.
- KevenM, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Of course it's legal. What happens after that point though is your problem. If you can hack your way into it, you can hack your way out of it. End of story already!!
- mattymayhem, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2The price of the plans AT&T are putting with the iPhone SHOULD be illegal...
Hope it isn't AU$100 a month when it comes to Australia. If it's Telstra it would be =/ - FreakyD, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Can't people just get over this already?
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