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Sick of Your iPhone AT&T Plan? There’s a Legal Loophole for That

July 28th, 2010 by Erin Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Ahhh, the art of jailbreaking.

It was huge in the 80’s and 90’s with those little black cable TV boxes. You know the ones EVERYONE had in their house – illegally – that allowed people to get every cable channel imaginable without the cable provider knowing.

Well, jailbreaking is buzzing yet again. This time among Apple iPhone users. And, it has taken on a whole new meaning – literally.

iPhone owners will now be able to legally break electronic locks on their phones in order to download unauthorized software applications and – ready for this? – break access controls in order to switch wireless carriers.

The decision to allow the practice commonly known as “jailbreaking” is one of a handful of new exemptions announced this week by the Library of Congress. The exemptions are from a 1998 federal law that prohibits people from bypassing technical measures that companies put on their products to prevent unauthorized uses.

In addition to jailbreaking, other exemptions announced this week would:

- allow people to break technical protections on video games to investigate or correct security flaws.

- allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos.

- allow computer owners to bypass the need for external security devices called dongles if the dongle no longer works and cannot be replaced.

Of course, these legal loopholes open up a whole can of worms about copyright infringement… but it sure is good news for those pirate techno-geeks who’ve been doing this – in secret- for years.

As for everyday iPhone users, you will have to be a technical wizard to know how to break those electronic locks. I bet, though, for more than a few people, being able to switch from AT&T to another wireless service provide is incentive enough to learn.

 Tags: apple iphone users, break access controls, electronic iphone locks, iphone at&t, iphone owners, jailbreaking, unauthorized software applications