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Comment by pierat | Hacker News Reader

The real answer here is REMOVING the DMCA on criminalizing reverse engineering and DRM.

If its your property, you should legally speaking tell any OTHER company to rightly fuck off about restrictions on your property.

Intellectual property rights (copyright, patent, trademark) should NOT have any ground in restricting property rights of things directly owned. Instead, we see shit like Iphones where they use the term "SELL", and then continual and ongoing restrictions by the FORMER OWNER.

If a company wants to maintain control, they should RENT it, with an explicit, simple to read rental agreement.

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As the owner of an iPhone, I can legally do whatever I want with it. The restrictions are on developers who sign agreements with Apple. Nothing stops me legally from jailbreaking my own phone.

Which legally speaking, hogwash.

This link covers 15 years of DMCA abuse, which you say doesn't apply to you.

https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-ye...

Your ignorance of this terrible law is not immunity of this law. Apple could as easily destroy your device with no recourse, or sue YOU personally for "defeat of technical prevention".

I didn't see any cases there of someone getting hassled for modding their own gear. Which one should I be looking at that backs up your contention?

Apple will be fighting against it every 3 years when DMCA exemptions have to be renewed.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreakin...

edit: after digging into this, my above statement is false as it no longer needs to be renewed every 3 years

That's from 2009. Did they file comments claiming individual-level jailbreaking is illegal in 2012, 2015, 2018, 2021, or this year?

I'm not an Apple employee or direct stockholder. I imagine my 401(k) has some in it, but I don't really know. I'm not claiming they're angels. What I am claiming is that Apple's never told me I'm not allowed to do whatever I want with the things I've bought from them. They might not support me in my ventures, and I'm sure they'd prefer I not, but I'm not aware of any case where Apple tried to legally limit a regular end customer's usage.

Well, they're the ones who spearheaded the attempt to make it illegal. They're not able to raise complaints for its renewal because, well, it _wasn't_ renewed in 2012, but is now covered under the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act.

Unfortunately we can't deduce the reasons why it wasn't renewed in 2012, but I imagine Apple was doing the best in their power to convince the Librarian to make that decision.

Your goalposts are moving.

You might want to see to that.

Hardly. I said it was legal for me to jailbreak my own phone if I want to, and have yet to see evidence to the contrary.

You asked if there were any cases of someone getting hassled for modding their own gear (and outside of phones, there are plenty of examples of that happening).

If we're going back to phones, then it would have been illegal to jailbreak for a few months in 2014 after their anti-circumvention exemption expired and before the aforementioned Unlocking Consumer Choice act took effect.

Though jailbreaking is still just one aspect of how DMCA is being used to restrict what you can do with the hardware you've purchased.

No this is false. If this law wasn't in place you could pay a professional service to jailbreak and modify your iphone for you.

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