Jail for iPhone Jailbreakers?

By Davey Winder
Monday, 16 February 2009 03:11

Market

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...

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