Apple's anti-jailbreaking announcement may inspire my whole family to jailbreak

[superstrikertwo]

You all are idiots. Read for once.

APPLE DOESN'T CARE IF YOU JAILBREAK

They only care if you are selling said Jailbroken device.

 

[ppc750fx]

They only care if you are selling said Jailbroken device.

I don't even think they care then either.

 

[MacbookAlum1536]

I never had to sign anything?

I think when it was activated trough iTunes you had to agree to some form.

 

[ppc750fx]

I think when it was activated trough iTunes you had to agree to some form.

1) That's a click-through EULA.

2) What if you didn't activate using iTunes?

 

[goosnarrggh]

1) That's a click-through EULA.

Click-through EULAs haven't been universally struck down in court yet.

Anyway, with my understanding of copyright law, the fact of the matter is that the copyright holder has a certain set of exclusive rights. Unless the copyright holder expressly gives you permission (eg. under a license agreement), nobody but the copyright holder is authorized to exercise these rights. Namely:
* To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
* To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
* To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
* To publicly perform the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
* To publicly display the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

It's the second exclusive right (creating a modified derivitave based on the original) that is potentially being infringed by jailbreaking. If it were to be proved in court that jailbreaking did, in fact, involve creating a derivitave work, then it would be criminal.

 

[ppc750fx]

It's the second exclusive right (creating a modified derivitave based on the original) that is potentially being infringed by jailbreaking. If it were to be proved in court that jailbreaking did, in fact, involve creating a derivitave work, then it would be criminal.

I'm pretty sure that's incorrect.

You're welcome to make derivative works, provided that they're not distributed, performed, or otherwise published (for profit or otherwise.)

For example: if you rip out a page from a book and replace it with a page of your own text, you've created a derivative work. That's completely legal, provided you don't, say, make a bunch of copies and sell it as a new book.

I'd like to preface the next section of my post by saying that IANAL, although the nature of some of my work has required that I have at least a passing familiarity with the DMCA and associated laws (specifically those dealing with reverse-engineering and DRM.)

Apple's got far more of a claim against jailbreaking on the basis of DMCA infringement than they do for copyright infringement; the former should be pretty easy to argue, while the latter is much, much more difficult. If Apple can argue that the code signing features, "chain of trust", and MobileDevice protections constitute a "protection mechanism" to prevent the duplication of copyrighted content without authorization, then they can argue that the current jailbreaking process (which requires the modification or removal of said protection mechanism) is in violation of the DMCA. And you know what? They'd pretty much be right. Although I'm not sure what exact examples they'd use in court (were it to come to that), I imagine that they'd try to demonstrate that running unsigned code on the device could cause an unauthorized third party to obtain the keys used for the decryption of FairPlay-protected content.

This is why the EFF is interested in the issue -- the DMCA is (potentially) being extended to cover something far beyond the original intent. Instead of being used to restrict software used to bypass content protection mechanisms, the DMCA may now be used to enforce the use of a single distribution channel (the App Store) and to shut out competitors. Since this sort of anti-competitive behavior doesn't exactly help consumers, the EFF has a vested interest in stopping this sort of (ab)use of the DMCA.

 

[goosnarrggh]

I'm pretty sure that's incorrect.

You're welcome to make derivative works, provided that they're not distributed, performed, or otherwise published (for profit or otherwise.)

For example: if you rip out a page from a book and replace it with a page of your own text, you've created a derivative work. That's completely legal, provided you don't, say, make a bunch of copies and sell it as a new book.

Point taken.

 

[millar876]

Tried Jailbreaking, Got a few apps, got board, decided for me it wasnt all that fab and restored it back to stock apple FW