Unlocking The iPhone: Illegal?

I've already written about the iPhone's longevity before, and serving as a testimony to that observation is that it continues to make headlines. These days, there's an ongoing race on how to unlock the iPhone, making it open to a carrier other than AT&T. To put it bluntly, you can take your existing SIM card out of your cellphone, pop it into an unlocked iPhone and use it as your mobile from that point onwards.

And it doesn't end there. By other carriers, I literally mean other carriers. This means that Chinese, Japanese and European SIM cards, among others, will be usable on the iPhone.

It all sounds good from a consumer perspective, but is it legal?

Apple and AT&T may have a legal case against unlockers under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), especially if they try to sell software code or devices that unlock the iPhone, the lawyers said. But the legal landscape gets a bit complicated -- there's a legal exception to the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions that allows individual mobile phone users to unlock their devices for use on other networks.

It's all a little murky at this point. I guess we won't get a definite answer until someone actually goes to court.

Source: CW

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