Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
There are already laws against piracy. Additional laws covering things merely leading up to that act should not be necessary nor desired.
That sounds like entirely sensible reasoning, so you shouldn't find it surprising that the lawmaking process never considered it.
And before you argue that weapons have no purpose except to break other laws, like jailbreaking there are many lawful or sporting uses of swords, firearms, explosives, etc.
We have laws against murder/assault, and we also have laws against making threats and reckless endangerment which I think should cover the other cases of bad things done with guns.
I'll go further and say that DUI laws are also redundant. Of course we don't want people driving drunk, but all we really need is some case law that establishes drunk driving as endangerment.
"The regulators said that the controls were necessary to prevent software piracy and differentiated gaming consoles from smart phones, which legally can be jailbroken:
[T]he record demonstrated that access controls on gaming consoles protect not only the console firmware, but the video games and applications that run on the console as well. The evidence showed that video games are far more difficult and complex to produce than smartphone applications, requiring teams of developers and potential investments in the millions of dollars. While the access controls at issue might serve to further manufacturers’ business interests, they also protect highly valuable expressive works – many of which are created and owned by the manufacturers – in addition to console firmware itself.
On the plus side, the regulators re-authorized jailbreaking of mobile phones."
Source:
-) http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/dmca-exemptions-rej...
-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4699962
I am aware that this does not fully answer your question, but this is at least their justification.
If you think about it, the traditional PC is one of the - and it's sad to say so - few devices where the hardware really is yours (one could argue that firmware is locked down etc, but i guess everybody knows what i mean).
There are not so many devices left that you can:
-) install custom software on
-) root without great efforts
Game consoles, Tablets, ebook Readers, and Smartphones (no matter if it's legal - still great effort to jailbreak it) - you are locked in everywhere...
Sad future ahead
Now I can - and this is improving.
It's you who doesn't get it. Despite the whole election facade, the government is not working for you or your benefit. It's working for the benefit of a very small minority, that cares not about your freedom, and believes that they are served by enforceable DRM.
Just as carving a garden-gnome is not intended, manufactured, or expected behavior, there's absolutely NO reason for a phone manufacturer to go out of their way to offer jailbreaking tools. Your statement is completely illogical. Just because it is legal for a user to do something does not mean a company should have to do it. Even if it is legal for a user to do something doesn't mean that they must be able to reasonably do it, it just means if they do there won't be legal ramifications. Your post reeks of self-entitlement and a deep misunderstanding of the actual issue in question.
Another ridiculous example to round it out: Since it is legal for me, as a user, to attempt to install visopsys (an operating system made by one man which is obviously incompatible with everything) on my macbook apple provide drivers and support for installing this OS even though supporting it would likely take thousands of developer hours and gain Apple nothing. Users likely won't be able to install it on their own and developing drivers for it is probably near impossible.
See how your argument is exactly the same as the above? Jailbreaking, just like that OS, is the product of users and as such need only be supported by users. If a company wants to support jailbreaking, such as google allowing chromebook unlocking, that's their prerogative, but there is NO reason to expect or insinuate that a company should actually provide support for some random operation a user has come up with that in fact is to the company's detriment.
Honestly, considering the quality of your argument, I question your ability to function in society. If you're not underage (on the order of 7 or so) I highly encourage you to check yourself into the nearest mental facility due to an obvious mental disability manifesting itself as borderline retardation. At the very least I encourage you to GET THE FUCK OFF HACKER NEWS FOREVER because reading your idiotic statements, opinions, and retard-spew is roughly as pleasant, and just as enlightening, as self castration while gargling shit. Save us all the pain of dealing with you and deal with yourself, fatally if necessary.
(If anyone missed it, read the last paragraph of his comment to understand).
Back on the subject, companies go out of their way to prevent certain usage scenarios. If that's suddenly against the law, it's only reasonable for them to provide a way out.
Actively preventing you from using a product to the fullest is very different from supporting unintended usage.
Jailbreaking is explicitly not an intended use of the product, and a manufacturer shouldn't be expected to provide any support whatsoever to something which the explicitly do not intend as a use. There may be all sorts of unintended consequences to jailbreaking and its unfair to expect a manufacturer to have the resources to think of every possible use case.
To take a ridiculous example (without copying jbbeats) if you choose to cut your hair with a lawnmower, you should not be able to complain that the lawnmower manufacturer didn't make it easier for you to swap out the blades for ones that barbers use instead of the cutting grass variety. That I think would be an unreasonable burden to put on the manufacturer.
There also may be unintended consequences in the basic operations of the machine if it is used in a different use case. For example, maybe hair grease could acccumulate overtime to make the lawnmower dangerous overtime. Perhaps a rubber guard would prevent this. Now the lawnmower manufacturer is having to support optional rubber guards for each range of lawnmowers for those few people intending to cut their hair with it.
While I share your desire to make jailbreaking easier, I don't think a law is the right way to do this.
Right, but no support is completely different from doing everything in your power to prevent it. If Jailbreaking is legal, there should be a “run arbitrary code & full access to file system” checkbox along with a “you are on your own, we won't support it” warning.
Since we are playing with crazy analogies here, the lawnmower manufacturer won't release a new model that makes it intentionally and artificially harder for you to switch the blades just so you don't cannibalize the sales of their hair trimmer.
What about tablets? No dice. The Librarian "found significant merit to the opposition’s concerns that this aspect of the proposed class was broad and ill-defined, as a wide range of devices might be considered 'tablets,' notwithstanding the significant distinctions among them in terms of the way they operate, their intended purposes, and the nature of the applications they can accommodate. For example, an e-book reading device might be considered a 'tablet,' as might a handheld video game device or a laptop computer."
Read this not as "smartphones yes but tablets no" but as "smartphones yes but kindle no".
This just say secondary-legislation-fail to me. Like man this stuffs hard (we can't do it logically and satisfy industry) lets just not bother.
Under the exception individuals are entitled to extract a small portion of the DVD for commentary, criticism or educational purposes. What if enough individuals independently choose unique excerpts, so that together they cover the entire motion picture? Sites could be set up to catalog which portions of a DVD have already been extracted and reviewed. Commentary might be something as simple as subtitles of the type vlc or mplayer can handle; these are nothing more than text files - removing subtitles is a matter of not loading the text file. Then one simply downloads all the clips and combines them into the full film using ffmpeg.
Implausible? What do you think?
1. Why are people not organising mass mailing campaigns to the Register to seek DMCA exceptions? Am I missing something here? It seems like she only receives a relatively small number of requests for exceptions considering the large audience of people affected by her decisions.
I have no idea whether many or even any of these individual comments were thereby read: many were from people not even in the US, many were difficult to understand in broken English... some were blank, and one was actually "the wrong PDF" (someone's University parking pass). Before seeing the pile that was sent in, I had made it my goal this year to read everything published, but when I got through the C's I just couldn't do it anymore and stopped.
They seem to have responded to it quite well, in that it wasn't a major issue in either direction: I didn't hear anything (although I was fairly disconnected and only indirectly getting information, so I might just not know) of any complaints; it didn't seem to help, however (in that neither of those exemptions were accepted).
I'm sure the librarian has an opinion, but how can they have jurisdiction?
Silly me. And I thought that "effective technical measure" was against copying, not modification.
I'm no copyright scholar, but this seems like they lack jurisdiction about this, and/or are trying a power grab.
E.g., Bunnie Huang's NeTV device modifies an HDCP encoded signal in-flight, adding an image overlay. If what you state about unlocking is true, then the NeTV is also illegal, and the DMCA is even worse than everyone thinks.
I'll show my work, since I'm not a copyright scholar either, just trying to interpret the official statement:
According to the summary on page 1, the questions are: (1) Are you circumventing a protection measure? (2) Is the measure protecting a copyrighted work? (3) Is your use of the copyrighted work non-infringing? [And according to pages 4-5, there's another question, although not directly relevant to your comment: (4) Is circumvention the only practical way to achieve the result of this use?]
The discussion of the unlocking exemption ("permits the circumvention of computer programs on mobile phones to enable such mobile phones to connect to alternative networks") starts on page 16. Page 17 includes an interesting bit about copyright:
"Proponents advanced several theories as to why “unlocking” is a noninfringing use, including that it does not implicate any copyright interests or, if it does, the conduct is permitted under Section 117 of the Copyright Act. In particular, proponents asserted that the owners of mobile phones are also the owners of the copies of the computer programs on those phones and that, as owners, they are entitled to exercise their rights under Section 117, which gives the owner of a copy of a computer program the privilege to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program under certain circumstances, such as to permit the program to be used on a particular machine."
But then page 19 presents a concern: according to some legal precedents, the owner of the phone may not be the owner of the software, so he or she wouldn't have the right to modify it. It says "the Register was forced to conclude that the state of the law – and its applicability to mobile phone software – remains indeterminate." After some more discussion of licensing and ownership, it goes on to say "The Register therefore determined that some subset of wireless customers – i.e., anyone considered to own the software on their phones under applicable precedent – would be entitled to exercise the Section 117 privilege."
I believe all of this shows that the Copyright Office considered whether it had jurisdiction and decided that it did. I don't know enough about Huang's NeTV work to be able to guess about how the DMCA applies to it.
It's not okay to tell someone what they can or cannot do with the 1's and 0's on their machines. DRM sucks and so do companies that would seek to restrict rights on how you can use your computer.
Of course, I could see hardware going the way of e-books: You don't own your phone/tablet/laptop, you merely license it from the Corporation who reserves the rights to control what you install or not and to erase it/take it back at any time.
"The Register additionally observed that granting an exemption for such a sweeping class would be without precedent in the history of Section 1201 rulemakings."
One of the specific issues with relation to these classes is that they be narrowly defined so that it can be fully understood; I was at the hearing in LA when one of the people on the panel seemed almost angry, asking whether the "tablet" class applied to "e-readers", such as a Kindle he personally owned (and seemed to feel would benefit from not having such an exemption).
But I reject system-wide DRM for the same reasons you describe. More and more people interact online primarily through mobile devices so these rights are more important than ever.
Making money selling digital goods is all about making paying easier than stealing.
I'm just curious, but have you ever observed anyone give up and buy something because they failed to pirate it?
I've done it myself many, many times.