It is no longer illegal in America to unlock a mobile phone.
Mobile phone makers and network providers often put locks on phones to prevent people from switching networks or installing applications that the manufacturer or network provider doesn’t approve of. This particularly applies to smartphones such as the iPhone and the Android. Of course, these locks have never stopped some from hacking into the software, but until this week, doing so was illegal in the USA.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has announced that software modifications that enable “handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker” are now legal.
Locked phones have been used to keep people tied into the same network and have made it harder for the people to recycle their old phones. EFF’s Civil Liberties Director said: “…The DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) shouldn’t be used to interfere with recyclers who want to extend the useful life of a handset,”. The Copyright Office recognises that the main reason for locking phones was not to protect copyrights but to tie people into contracts.
This means that mobile phone recyclers can now recycle and resell handsets that originally operated on one network so that they can operate on another. The rules only apply to used phones though, not to new ones.