The Electronic Frontier Foundation has started a petition at jailbreakingisnotacrime.org to ensure jailbreaking is kept legal.
Back in July of 2010 the Copyright Office added an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which made jailbreaking your smartphone legal. The exemption is set to expire after three years and the EFF is trying to make sure that doesn't happen.
The petition at jailbreakingisnotacrime.org will let you add your support to a letter written by Bunnie Huang, author of Hacking the Xbox. The EFF would also like those who can write their own letter to submit their defense of jailbreaking to the Copyright Office. You can find more information about that here.
At the very least we would urge you to add your signature to the petition. There's only 14 days left to sign!
I signed it ! Who knows what might happen down the road if we skip on this. laws get overturned all the time, I'm surprised there isn't more reply's here.
I'm new to iphones, but I read through the small print of Apple's purposes in the first place, and it said it welcomed people coming forward and improving their products and their software ... that this technology had all originated freely through university students using their intelligence to create the software of the iphone industry, and the message also said we should all be free thinkers and not let anyone whatsoever stand in anyone's way of progress i.e no copywriting or preventing anyone from adapting the software. Holting jailbreaking is anti this purpose! I don't know all the correct jargon but we should all be happy to live in a world where we can use such technology and why are apple suddenly becoming so stuffy and jealous of competition. We still pay to the apple store ... whats the problem? As long as Jailbreaking does not also begin being hypocritical we should all be fine :-) Carry on the good work everyone ... iphones are freeing the world and why stop freedom?
What occurs after Jailbreaking IS a CRIME.
The benefits described in the letter - are not passed back to companies like Apple to better the product. Jailbreaking only has offered options around what the product was designed to do.
One example is selling of specific applications in the Cydia store NOT available on the AppStore - a violation against the eco-system and design of the product and competition unfairly set. CydiaStore has also provided freely apps which are paid apps to drive new users to Jailbreking their devices.
If Jailbreaking a device does anything positive and benefiting the product -- then it should be informing the company to make the securities and not against it.
YES - it is a crime. If you need your phone to cook toast then buy a toaster... not re-engineer it to function differently and work on a different service and obtain stolen apps.
ds