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Comment by zb1plus | Hacker News Reader

Nope. If a person "owns" a piece of hardware, it should be legal to jailbreak it without any consequences (except perhaps lack of support for 3rd party software) and companies that sell products that build off of jailbroken products should be 100% legal. Edge case products like Prima Cinema can simply lease the hardware with restrictions on how can be used under the terms of the lease. If Apple feels so strongly about locking down their platform, they can adjust their business model and lease their hardware to customers. However, companies should not be able to legally "sell" products that transfer ownership if they are going to include "strings" restricting the usage of the product.

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>Nope. If a person "owns" a piece of hardware, it should be legal to jailbreak it without any consequences (except perhaps lack of support for 3rd party software) and companies that sell products that build off of jailbroken products should be 100% legal.

All of those things are true today.

The question was: >Should closed hardware (that owns its entire stack) even be legal to sell?

And the answer to that is: obviously it should be, if you care about competition and innovation. The only people that disagree with this are the tech people who have had problems with Apple's business on ideological grounds for decades (people like Richard Stallman and saurik).

But outside that one particularly small constituency, there's no good public policy reason to actually make it illegal, and plenty of reasons not to.

Correct. It's been perfectly legal since 2010.

>The U.S. Librarian of Congress ruled on Monday that consumers who circumvent digital protections on smartphones to install unapproved applications—a practice often colloquially known as “jailbreaking”—for noninfringing reasons should be exempted from prosecution under the anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

https://www.macworld.com/article/1152935/jailbreak_exemption...

If you can figure it out, you can jailbreak it; but there is no reason why jailbreaking a device is inherently possible: jailbreaks for iOS are happening later and later in the boot cycle and so are more and more limited, and we have had a single bootrom exploit in like a decade. If you want to be able to jailbreak a device it must be illegal to lock it down like that, not merely legal for someone to figure out how to maybe break the lock after you build it.

>If you want to be able to jailbreak a device it must be illegal to lock it down like that

I'm not sure why you're putting this in terms of iOS, since many Android devices also ship with a locked bootloader.

>there is no reason why jailbreaking a device is inherently possible

Any iDevice with an A11 or earlier has an unpatchable bootloader flaw that absolutely makes it inherently jailbreakable. Apple cannot prevent you from jailbreaking those devices, nor can it patch the flaw with a future version of the OS.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/devel...

Yes, the "consumers" should be exempted, not anyone selling solutions to do this or just giving them up for free. Which essentially means that unless you are an uber hacker that does this for their iPhones, nobody else can do it. It's pretty pointless in practice.

You don't have to be any sort of hacker. A jailbreaking app like Checkra1n will step you through the process.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/11/10/how-to-jailbreak-wi...

That exception is for Smart Phones, and I think has expired even

This would not apply to something like Prima Cimea, nor a John Deere Tractor, or 1000's of other things.

Also the wording of the exception bu LoC was very open to interpretation and not as powerful as people commonly think

At the beginning you said nope but based on your explanation I feel like you meant to say yep... e.g. yes, we should make it illegal.

Ahh, I see the problem - thanks Osiris - there are 2 questions, each of them opposite.

> Should closed hardware (that owns its entire stack) even be legal to sell?

and

> Yes, it's legal today but should we make it illegal?

Good thing I'm not a lawyer!

> Should closed hardware (that owns its entire stack) even be legal to sell?

His answer: Nope.

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