Cell Phone Owners Allowed To Break Software Locks

An anonymous reader writes "The library of congress approved many copyright exemptions today. Among the exemptions were new rules about cell phones, DVDs, and electronic books." From the article: "Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday. Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books. All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years. In granting the exemption for cell phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren't able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones' underlying programs."

Re:Read or Die?

[minusX]

[i]I think Europe is smarter than USA and will not destroy the lock-down supported expansion of mobile telephony. Europe and its GSM system is much ahead of americans in mobile communications and cannot alow it to collapse.[/i] What do you mean? I know a few places in Europe where they REQUIRE companies to unlock the devices if users ask.

Re:Read or Die?

[FinestLittleSpace]

In the UK unlocking has not damaged the industry at all. Here you sign a contract; you can't break the contract, so therefore even if you unlock your phone, you still have to pay the remainder of your contract.

That sorts it all out in one.

Re:Read or Die?

[CmdrGravy]

I think the mobile phone industry can take off just fine without locked down handsets.

I live in Europe and I have never seen or heard of anyone who has their phones functionality locked down. Most people don't buy phones here, they get them for "free" when they sign up to a years contract. At the end of the year you get an upgrade to a new handset and can keep the old one and do what you like with it including using it on other networks.

Re:Read or Die?

[pe1chl]

You must be new.
It was quite usual to have a "SIM lock" on phones provided for free, especially with pre-paid contracts (where you pay a certain amount for a number of call minutes, can call for that amount of time, and then have to pay again to continue using the phone).
As there is no fixed-term contract with monthly payment in this construction, the only way to cover the cost of the phone is/was for the provider to hope that you buy enough call minutes.
To prevent you from changing the SIM to one of another provider (with cheaper call minutes, for example), they "had" to lock the phone to the SIM.
However, after a certain amount of time you could request a code to release this lock. Or you could use a hack and have it released immediately.

Re:Read or Die?

[moatra]

Otherwise, I thought USA is governed by President, Representatives and Senate. The only Library that had government power was in the japanese anime "Read or Die" and that was the British Library. Who is a library to decide what can be hacked? That is a matter of legislation, reserved for the authority of elected officials only.

The Library of Congress houses the U.S. Copyright Office. Thus, the current Librarian of Congress had the Copyright office pass the following regulation: Exemption to Prohibition against Circumvention [loc.gov]. They did so with the authority given to them in Title 17 of the US Code Section 1201(a)(1)(C) [copyright.gov]. So yes, they were within their legal bounds... too bad it only lasts for 3 years though.

Re:Technicalities

[1u3hr]

I might buy a phone for $1 and pay it off over 24 months. If I break the lock I am not paying for the phone.

Presumably you signed a contract to pay or subscribe to some service. The contract is still enforcible legally, they just can't hold your phone hostage by locking it up.

Re:Library of Congress?

[91degrees]

Since when the fuck does anyone give two-shits what the library of congress says?

1998.

Where'd they get this authority????

From the DMCA, which gets its authority from the US government, which in turn gets its authority from the voters of the US.

Cell phones

[AlphaLop]

I think this was enacted for a few reasons, the one that most specifically has to do with me is the cell phone section. I recently subscribed to Verizon for my cell phone service. I bought a Motorola V3M as a friend of mine (with another carrier) had one. Well, much to my chagrin many of the things he could do with his I could not (such as take a snippet of music I own and use it for a ring tone) due to the cripple ware they installed with there phones. They actually removed functionality in an effort to make me have to purchase ring tones and wallpapers from them. I personally am getting sick and tired of having to pay over and over again for the same song/video/etc, and hopefully this will go a long way towards fixing the problem.

In Soviet Russia...

[monktus]

...or actually the rest of the world, it's generally neither illegal or impractical to unlock a mobile for use on any network. AFAIK, the only UK networks who still SIM lock their phones are Orange and T-Mobile (and maybe 3, I forget), and you can get most phones unlocked for about a tenner.

I did so recently with an old SonyEricsson from T-Mobile when I discovered that my Orange Windows Mobile powered PDA was useless as a phone.

The mobile market in the US seems a bit peculiar generally.

Re:Read or Die?

[david.given]

You pay once to have a phone number assigned to you and get a SIM-locked handset (for cheap due to big subsidy from the telco) but if you actually want to talk on it, you have to buy creditcard sized vouchers with a taped over code. Remove the tape, type the long keycode into the handset and send it in SMS short message to a service number. The voucher is invalidated and your SIM card is credited with the amount of money or talktime.

Yeah, I have one --- I spend maybe 15 UKP a year on call charges. But surely, who sells subsidised pay-as-you-go phones? Everywhere I've looked, and I've recently upgraded to a new phone so I've looked quite hard, the pay-as-you-go price for a phone is considerably more expensive than the contract price for exactly this reason.

Re:Read or Die?

[badzilla]

The EU and UK are not approaching unlocking rights from the point of view of copyright protection, rather they see it as a "restraint of trade" lawful competition issue where locking interferes with your consumer rights to dump one network and prefer the services of another.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Oh, you're being granted "use" back again.

[RAMMS+EIN]

``In my day, we called this "fair use", and were allowed to do this as an exemption from general copyright rules.''

I'm not sure about the situation in the States, but in the Netherlands (as well as other EU countries), "fair use" is more than just "exemptions from general copyright rules": these cases are actually written in the law as rights of the public.

The EUCD (EU equivalent of the DMCA) explicitly overrides these rights, by stating that effective technical measures that prevent you from doing certain things may not be circumvented (doing so is a criminal offense), even if these measures prevent you from exercising things you have the right to do under copyright law.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so don't take my statements as the ultimate truth about EU law, much less US law

Cellphone locking

[jonwil]

There are 2 kinds of cellphone locking, there is the locks that prevent you using any other network and there are the locks that disable features such as the abillity to load MP3 files directly from a PC for use as ringtones or the abillity to read camera pictures back from the phone without going through per-pay services (Verizon mobile is notorious for this kind of locking crap). It would appear as though this copyright office ruling only covers the first kind (network locks) and not the second kind (feature locks).

Just though everyone should know...

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

...that the DMCA anti-circumvention laws only apply to copyrighted content, not public domain works. Still, it is illegal to distribute circumvention technology. Will we have to wait for the DVD to go the way of the projector before we can distribute libcss?

Re:Requirements for usage restricted equipment

[fermion]

The claim is that the carriers sell the equipment at a loss, and then make the profits on the multiyear contracts. The current argument is that the cost of acquiring the customer and the discount is so great, that the customer now has to pay extra if only on a one year contract.

But if the claim that they are losing money on the phone is true, then why won't the activate a phone the customer supplies. The carrier is not losing money on the sale of the phone. The carrier is still getting a contract. The phone is part number equivalent to what they sell. A friend lost a phone, and I tried to get the carrier to use a phone the sold me a couple years previous, and they refused. They wanted another two years of contract.

Like so many other things, the issue is control. Control your customer and you control your revenue. With the recent merger of SBC and ATT, some wonder if the fight to break them up was worth it. If you recall the lock that ATT had on the consumer, the answer is yes. ATT charged huge fees if the customer ran more than one line in the house. Not had more than one phone number, just had multiple phones. ATT charged huge rents on phones. ATT charged husge long distance fees, some of which were justified due to limited bandwidth and cost of launching satellites, but they cost kept rising even though bandwidth was growing and the technology was maturing rapidly. The consumer lock in kept prices high, just like land lines providers can still charge huge sums of money for to call someone 20 miles away.

Re:How about not treating me like a criminal in th

[Steve001]

ArsenneLupin wrote as part of a post:

Most importantly, in 50 or 60 years when the copyrights actually expire, will you still even want your 128kbps mp3? Of course not. The public domain file will be provided in a superior format from a master recording.

And where, pray tell, would this recording come from? All would be fine and dandy if the original master recording is still around. But for all we know, the company having done such recording may long have gone bust, or they might still be around, but unwilling to provide it for whatever reason. So, the only way to keep companies honest would be to force them to deposit an DRM-unencumbered copy at the Library of Congress. But, AFAIK, there is no such law. And even if there were, who's gonna check that all those zillions of media deposited daily are indeed compliant? Moreover, there's no fundamental reason why future DRM can't include a system which automatically disables DRM upon copyright expiration. But of course, any system which checks the validity of DRM licenses would be attacked as an invasion of "privacy."

The concern of the loss of the original recordings is not an unreasonable concern. In the mid-1980s I remember reading in a magazine that when the music of Simon and Garfunkel was first released on CD the producers had to use second-generation tapes because the original master tapes had been lost (the tapes may have been found by now). At the time this would have been less than 25 years after the original recordings were made.

Another concern is: Will there be equipment still able to play those recordings once they enter the public domain? For example, how many people can actually play an 8-track tape now? (Per the movie "So Wrong They're Right" there is still interest in the 8-track format but the number of available players will decrease as they wear out). I doubt the holders of the original tapes will release them to the public once they fall into the public domain.

you are correct

[zogger]

They couldn't even hang onto and keep track of the freaking moonshot vids master tapes and supposedly even if they did have them there was only oneold machine thaty could view them. And no telling how much private sector video and stills have been lost because someone's precious was kept locked up and people couldn't make copies and keep transferring it as tech improved. We've already lost a ton of golden age of TV for example-just gone, unobtanium. If anything in the rapidly changing digital world, copyright terms should be drastically shortened, so that archieving human knowledge can be spread out in a much wider fashion, hopefully so that at least some records remain that are readable. All the eggs in one basket approach is the suxorz.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Can someone explain to us non-Americans?

[Workaphobia]

I'm no expert on the specifics, but the law in question is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (1998), which imposes a number of soul-sucking restrictions on what us Americans can do with legally purchased digital content. The most well-known clause is the one that targets the distribution of tools that can be used to bypass DRM, regardless of whether or not using the tools qualifies as Fair Use.

The Library of Congress is specifically mentioned in that law as having the power to specify exemptions. Basically, Congress took away our Fair Use rights over a broad class of content, and gave the LoC the power to selectively return a few of those rights to us under special circumstances.