An Emancipation Proclamation for the iPhone

With a single pen stroke, it looks like the federal government may have blown the closed Apple iPhone ecosystem wide open (at least for the tinkering crowd). In their periodic updating of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibitions again circumventing copyright protections, the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Office today ruled that it is lawful for mobile phone users to “jailbreak” their devices in order to use apps not approved by the manufacturer and to unlock their phones in order to change carriers (though there are barriers other than the DMCA to both practices). More on this to come as we await comment from Apple, which had maintained that jailbreaking was illegal, although it has never pressed the issue in court.