Davey Winder
Monday, 16 February 2009 04:11
IT Industry -
Market
Page 1 of 2
Apple has done everything, apart from waving the copyright infringement red card, it can to make life difficult for iPhone jailbreaker pwnage developers. Until now, that is.
Every time Apple updates the iPhone OS, so the
iPhone Dev Team
updates the PwnageTool to jailbreak the Jesus
Phone.
Even when it Apple has thrown unexpected spanners in the works, such as
using iTunes updates to
break Pwning resources, the maverick developers
fire back with work around updates of their own.
It seems that no matter what it does, even resorting to
Pwnage breaking
bug fixes, there simply is
no getting rid of the jailbreakers.
The straw that jailbroke the Apple's back would seem to be a submission
to the US Copyright Office from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
which seeks to grant a exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DCMA) to give users the legal right to freely modify the iPhone OS
to enable independent applications to run.
The EFF requests an exemption to allow "computer programs that enable
wireless telephone handsets to execute lawfully obtained software
applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose
of enabling interoperability of such applications with computer
programs on the telephone handset."
Apple has, perhaps unsurprisingly since it is pretty much backed into a
corner here, responded by submitting a claim to the US Library of
Congress.
The DCMA allows the Library of Congress to get involved because of encryption found within the iPHone OS.
Apple is able to look for the Library of Congress to effectively
overrule a DCMA exemption, because of the encryption 'loophole' for
want of a better word, and so is claiming that reverse engineering
violates it's copyright.
So what is Apple arguing for, and what does the EFF have to say on the matter? More on page 2...
CONTINUES
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