Three years ago the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) successfully lobbied for the U.S. Copyright Office to add jailbreaking the iPhone to the list of Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions. Their efforts allowed the Jailbreak community (and ModMyi) to flourish and operate without fear of legal prosecution (for the most part).
Now the EFF is asking the U.S. Copyright Office to extend the same jailbreaking exemption to tablets and video game consoles.
“Technology has evolved over the last three years, and so it’s important to expand these exemptions to cover the real-world uses of smartphones, tablets, video game consoles, DVDs, and video downloads,” — EFF in a statement last week.
“If jailbreaking or rooting gains more popularity, it may lead to an increasing number of malware and attacks,” — Dennis Maslennikov Kaspersky Lab malware analyst.
Part of me wants Apple and others to embrace jailbreaking, not by opening up the App Store and deregulating what developers can do, but by making the jailbreak process easier. Devs and hackers dedicate a ton of time and effort into working around Apple's roadblocks, it'd be nice to have Apple throw a fastball across the plate every time instead of a knuckle, curve, and then a slider. But, that could handicap the allure of the jailbreak for some, and could make the community lazier and less appreciative.
Either way the EFF's efforts, if successful, will let jailbreak developers everywhere sleep a little easier knowing their efforts aren't breaking any copyright laws.
Source: MacWorld
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