Petition the Whitehouse to make unlocking cell phones legal | Hacker News Reader

Petition the Whitehouse to make unlocking cell phones legal

petitions.whitehouse.gov

135 pointssinak35 comments

This lacks vision. Petition to make locking cell phones illegal.

This is also misdirected. Legislators make and unmake law. Petition them.

Petitioning every congress member may be less effective - each person would have to write their local representative. We the people at least gets our voice heard if we get enough signatures. The White House definitely has some say in the legislative process, even if they don't get to make the final decisions.

Making locking cell phones illegal would be ideal. But keeping the status quo seems much more achievable.

And at least I'm trying. If you want to start something to petition congress to make unlocking illegal, I'm 100% behind you.

Sorry if my comment sounded harsh. I actually disagree with my own statement. Cell phone companies ought to be able to lock their phones if they want. And we should be able to unlock the phones that we buy, as the petition argues for. Provided we buy them, that is. Cell phone companies could prevent us from unlocking phones by leasing rather than selling them, if they so choose.

We're all adults here and perfectly capable of making our own rules through contracts. The anti-circumvention clauses of the DMCA seem unnecessary to me.

That's a nice theory. But the reality is that the ignorance and complacency of the average person drives these and other abusive tactics we're treated to in our everyday business and work relationships. Ever read a standard contract for just about anything (employment, cellular service, cable TV, internet access, home mortgage, etc.) Most of the ones I've read, I think "No sane person would sign this." Yet almost everyone does, and it often makes life difficult when you fail to blindly follow along.

So, petition to make cell phones cost 2x-3x more up front?

I know what you're getting at, but the DMCA and carrier subsidies don't really have much to do with each other. My contract with my carrier has early termination fees and other rules that prevent the carrier from getting screwed. This is true regardless of whether or not its legal to unlock my phone.

You can already buy an iPhone unlocked from Apple, can't you?

If that's what you want, why wouldn't you just do that?

Why are you limiting this to iPhones?

I'm not, at least not intentionally; I'm familiar with iPhones and not with the market for Android phones.

Are there phones you are unable to buy unlocked? I guess Android phones with carrier OS enhancements, but I didn't think those were widely desirable.

Maybe it makes more economic sense in some cases to purchase the subsidized phone. There are plenty of perfectly reasonable use cases that do no affect the carrier's ability to recoup the subsidy and or have no other practical effect on the contract.

No, but let telcos compete without the lock in. What they are doing with subsidized phones is obfuscating prices.

And nothing prevents them from imposing early termination fees.

The lock-in is something the telco is selling you. If you don't want it, don't buy it. You can get an unlocked iPhone direct from Apple.

I understand that, but by bundling the phone with the plan and making impossible to distinguish what you are paying for the phone and what you are paying to make calls, to effectively compare two offers, or even to purchase the service without the device, they limit competition.

This is bad for consumers.

This reeks of useless snark.

Yes, we could and should petition to make locking cell phones illegal, but as of this weekend the exemption that allows you to unlock is going away -- this is a much more present problem than high-aiming goals of reform.

Also, this is not misdirected, as the exemption is being taken out by a policy change decision of one person. The DMCA is a definite fault, but this specific instance is an example of something that can be ameliorated extralegislatively.

Hi everyone, I started this because I think the Librarian of Congress' decision is really bad for consumers.

The new petitions feature requires 100,000 signatures to be considered.

Please sign, and if you can tweet it out, share it on Facebook, or email it to a journalist, every little helps.

I think this may be (literally) misplaced. The Library of Congress and the US Copyright Office aren't really part of the Executive branch.

If there's any sign of degradation of the HN community, it's the rising frequency of these pointless whitehouse.gov petitions showing up on the front page.

And also the rising frequency of blog posts of every minor change at GitHub.

Meh, there's at least some substance there. But I agree. Too much of several things.

Has any of these petitions ever accomplished anything?

Not to my knowledge. But then, 90% of the petitions are frivolous[1] or beyond the power of the Executive branch[2] anyway. Serious proposals (e.g. [3]) rarely meet the "publicly visible" threshold, let alone the (now 4x higher) response threshold.

[1]: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/declare-monday-fol...

[2]: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/eliminate-gerryman...

[3]: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/call-revision-or-r...

Uh, doesn't this petition also fall under [2]? The US Copyright Office isn't part of the Executive branch.

I hadn't realized the Copyright Office is under Congress (though that might explain its dysfunction.) But you're right, this petition is outside Presidential power to act upon.

They are usually met with long-winded responses that boil down to "nah".

A beer recipe.

http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/09/white-house-relea...

More importantly, let's petition the Whitehouse to respect petitions!

Has anything useful come out of "We The People" petitions beyond a pressure release valve for angry mobs?

You will not get a response unless you put "Death Star" in it. So perhaps saying something like, "Make unlocking cell phones being used on the Death Star legal" would get a response.

Otherwise, most of these will not get far even if they get the 100k signatures. For example, making research papers free and open (what Aaron Swartz wanted) got the required signatures but did not get a response.

Why should they have such restrictive control over the device in the first place?

After a successful contract completion, the device should be the end-users 100%, but it seems like the telecom's are futilely fighting to control the balance of power by "dumbing down" the absolute potential of the devices they release.

This is truly scary.

Unlocking a phone that i own should be my right. If I want to use my phone out of the country or on any provider after I have paid for is no different then changing an engine in a car.

Here is a better approach. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience

Ask them what copyright law has to do with choosing your cell phone carrier.

Forgive me, but wasn't it already legal, since it was special case'd in the DMCA?

This whole situation confuses me.

You're right - this should have "again" concatenated on the end of the title string.

It was not special cased in the DMCA.

The short, generalized answer is:

The DMCA's DRM circumvention provision (the one that made it not legal to decrypting dvd's you own, etc) has an exemption process, run by the registrar of copyrights every 3 years.

In 2010, they exempted unlocking phones. That exemption was not renewed during the rulemaking at the end of last year, and will expire on saturday.

See http://www.copyright.gov/1201/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com