Unlocking Your Phone Is Now Illegal In The U.S.

Yesterday 01/26/13 was marked a day in history, unlocking your phone has become illegal. As harsh as it seems, anyone who unlocks his or her handset in the U.S. without written consent from his or her carrier, could face civil or even criminal action. At most, you could face a $2,500 fine if you unlock your handset merely to use another carrier. For example, there are nearly 2 million Apple iPhone users who have unlocked their phone, and use T-Mobile's unlimited service. If you unlock phones for profit because you're, say, a cellphone re-seller then it is a whole other ballgame and you could face a half a million dollars in fines and some prison time.

So what happened to make doing something to your own personal property against the law? The Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office no longer give cellphones an exemption under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The intent of the law was to prevent infringement of copyrights, not to specifically ban the unlocking of your new smartphone. For most people, the change won't make any difference because the majority of mobile phone users don't unlock their handset.

If your phone was unlocked prior to this weekend, don't keep staring at the door waiting for the cops to come bursting in as you are grandfathered in. Besides, no one really expects the carriers to go after their own customers anyway. Despite that, at least one attorney recommends not to unlock that new handset you just bought. 

Brad Shear, an attorney who is an expert on social media says, "I don't see carriers going aggressively after people, but bottom line is that I would not recommend violating this provision of the law."

Sound off, leave a comment and let us know what you think. Will this affect you? Are people blowing this out of proportion? 


Source: Yahoo News

It May Become Illegal To Unlock Your Cell Phone

Do you all remember that ruckus that happened over whether or not it was illegal to jailbreak your mobile device? Well, that whole fiasco is poised to come back in a bad way this weekend. As part of that decision, it may become illegal to unlock your smartphone starting this Saturday, January 26th, unless you get permission from your carrier.

This all goes back to the decision by the U.S. Copyright Office, which decided back in October that it was legal to jailbreak your mobile device under an exemption in the DMCA. Unfortunately, that exemption was only extended for 90 days when it came to unlocking a device that you purchase from a carrier, and that 90 days ends on Saturday. 

To be clear, this will make it illegal to unlock carrier-locked devices without permission from your carrier. This doesn't apply to devices that start out unlocked like many Verizon LTE devices, like the Verizon iPhone 5, and the Verizon HTC Windows Phone 8X, or T-Mobile devices like the Nexus 4. And, of course, unlocking and jailbreaking will still void your warranty. 

Apparently, according to the U.S. Copyright Office, jailbreaking and rooting are legal because the DMCA exemption means that users own the software on the device, and are allowed to jailbreak/root.  But following that logic, as of Saturday, we don't own the hardware that we purchase from carriers, so unlocking becomes illegal.

Source: Technews Daily