Jailbreaking Now Legal in the USA

**Update 1: Apple has officially responded to this via Cult of Mac:

“Apple’s goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience. As we’ve said before, the vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones as this can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably.”

We have some great news for our neighbours down South. It’s now legal to jailbreak your iPhone thanks to a government ruling that has been approved. Users are no longer legally liable for jailbreaking their iPhones.

From the WSJ:

The decision to allow the practice commonly known as ”jailbreaking” is one of a handful of new exemptions from a 1998 federal law that prohibits people from bypassing technical measures that companies put on their products to prevent unauthorized uses. The Library of Congress, which oversees the Copyright Office, reviews and authorizes exemptions every three years to ensure that the law does not prevent certain non-infringing uses of copyright-protected material.

The exceptions are a big victory for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had urged the Library of Congress to legalize several of them, including the two regarding cell phones.

Jennifer Stisa Granick, EFF’s civil liberties director, said the rules are based on an important principle: Consumers should be allowed to use and modify the devices that they purchase the way they want. ”If you bought it, you own it,” she said.

This is fantastic news and I agree wholeheartedly with the EFF–if you bought, you own it! Let the iPhone Dev Team continue with their amazing work.

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