Jailbreaking *is* legal – US Library of Congress
The US Copyright Office has declared that jailbreaking your iPhone is legal under Copyright law / DMCA – (although note: Apple could still go to court to challenge this):
“the Copyright Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: “When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”"
The Wall Street Journal has some brief coverage, with some interesting stats, notably:
- Rock Your Phone has seen downloads to 4 million jailbroken phones
- Jailbroken phones have spent total of $2 million purchasing apps from Rock Your Phone
One thing I’ve noticed a lot in reporting of jailbroken iPhones is that it tends to be entirely USA-centric, due to the news polices of various sites and publications.
This is unhelpful, since Europe had far greater reason to jailbreak. For a year or so (longer in some countries), Europeans could buy iPhones, but the only way to actually use them was to jailbreak them – Apple hadn’t signed any contracts with European telcos.
For a while, it seemed there were more jailbroken phones in Europe than “normal” ones. It would be very interesting to know what the percentages of normal vs jailbreak phones in the different territories. Although … it’s very hard to find ANY info on this subject on Google – you have to page through hundreds of screens of spammers, scammers, etc selling jailbreak kits. The same kits that (usually) are available free from the original programmers…
