iBooks 1.2.1 Detects Some Jailbreaks, Disables iBookstore Purchases in Response

[ugahairydawgs]

Honestly the fact that I have to JB just to tweak the most basic functions iOS annoys me as it is. Now that they are resorting to this kind of non-sense is just a bit much. The fact that they are allowing iBook purchases from a JB'd iPhone but not letting you open the book after the fact is so far beyond shady that I have a hard time seeing how they justify it to themselves.

It's bait and switch....plain and simple.

Apple you make great computers. But your repeated hard handed approach to dealing with iOS is making it less and less appealing by the day.

 

[thegman1234]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8C148)

Let me clarify. Your logic is sensible and I'm not against it in anyway. I'm for Apple in this situation because I feel that they have the right to control services provided to their devices, and can deny service if their device is configured in a way that see unfitting (No shirt, no shoes, no service kind of deal). My views on this topic are in no way related to piracy.

But the law does not agree with you, that is why the library of congress (not sure why they have the say) made it spicifically legal to jailbreak, even mentioned the dev team.

Theft of paid services remains illegal and detectable, I just think they would be better served by going after the actuall crooks

Yes, the government has made jailbreaking legal. That means that Apple has to allow jailbreakers to jailbreak if they please. It doesn't mean Apple has to comply by providing services to said jailbreakers.

 

[thompson11]

But the law does not agree with you, that is why the library of congress (not sure why they have the say) made it spicifically legal to jailbreak, even mentioned the dev team.

Theft of paid services remains illegal and detectable, I just think they would be better served by going after the actuall crooks

The LOC's determination was that you cannot be civilly liable, under the DMCA, as an end-user, for jailbreaking (specifically, they established that behavior as an exemption to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions). That's it. Nothing more. I don't understand where you and the others are getting this idea that this somehow means that Apple or any other company cannot discourage/try to prevent/make consequences for jailbreaking. It just means that under ONE federal law, the DMCA, you cannot be liable for circumventing-by-jailbreak.

Please get your facts straight before repeating what is a certifiably incorrect position.

 

[NT1440]

Huge difference between something not working in a future update and intentionality breaking it. Apple choose to intentionally break it. Apple has crossed a huge line.

It's not even breaking it, its getting a programmer to write a few lines that essentially say, "so you're jailbroken? Fine, none of your legitimately books will open now."

This is ridiculous.

 

[notjustjay]

Actually it's not like that. It's more like, you bought customized third party parts for you car, but the car manufacturer put in a little check to see that if you have any 3rd party parts, it will automatically break your engine until you take those parts off.

I think it's more like, you are granted the use of a company car as part of your employment. But if you start modding the car in ways that the company does not expect (nor desire) they decide to take away the privilege.

 

[RoboCop001]

Apple's tactics are of course drawing some scrutiny from jailbreak fans, many of whom are pointing to recent actions by the U.S. government to explicitly allow jailbreaking. Consequently, Apple's move to prevent access to legitimately purchased iBookstore content just because the user attempts to view it on a jailbroken device is seen as interference with legal usage.

But it just allows people to do it, it doesn't say that Apple has to allow it. So how are people using that ruling against Apple? lol

Or am I misinterpreting it?

 

[Ashyukun]

Jailbreaking is not a violation of the DMCA per se. However, if you read the article, it seems that Apple checks whether applications that have been copied illegally would run on the device, and in that case iBookStore doesn't run. So they are explicitly checking for a device that _is_ in violation of the DMCA.

No- they're checking to see if 'test code' will run on the device, something that ALL Jailbroken devices can do, likely because that's how JAILBREAK apps are able to run on the device. By your statement ALL jailbroken devices would be in violation of the DMCA.

Frankly, I don't care a heck of a lot with direct regards to iBooks- like most others, I've found it far inferior to the Kindle app (which to my amusement was itself updated very recently as well to be even better...) especially with regards to the content: the last 3 books I've been interested in getting haven't been available on iBooks but were on the Kindle. FAIL.

However, it is concerning with regards to the potential future implications and whether the start putting things like this in more of their applications. I may not care about iBooks, but DO have a good bit of music purchased from iTunes and WOULD be pissed off if they suddenly changed the iTunes app to not allow me to play the songs (or run at all) on a jailbroken device...

 

[Night Spring]

Yes, the government has made jailbreaking legal. That means that Apple has to allow jailbreakers to jailbreak if they please. It doesn't mean Apple has to comply by providing services to said jailbreakers.

Denying service, fine. But this is taking your money, and *then* denying service. That's actually stealing, isn't it?

 

[Laird Knox]

I'm generally ok with Apple choosing to implement measures to make jailbreaking more difficult. I wish they wouldn't, but I don't think it's wrong of them to do so.

However, this is going too far. If you purchase a book off of iBooks, but then jailbreak your device, your right to read that book shouldn't be revoked. I don't know if there's a potential legal issue (no armchair lawyering for me), but I certainly think this one is a very bad policy for Apple. I hope they decide to back off on this one.

jW

Then the process of jailbreaking shouldn't break the DRM.

 

[OllyW]

If you take a seat at a bar and then begin to act unruly, should management not be allowed to remove you from the premises?

But they have already done the jailbreak. I wouldn't expect your theoretical bar management to serve a customer who was acting unruly before they had been served.

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

So, first, the copyright ruling is irrelevant to this.

I'm curious if there's some kind of jailbreak means to bypass the DRM and run books which have been downloaded without purchase. It would make sense for Apple to defend this as it would be important to people publishing to the iBookstore and the platform, but I'd prefer they do so in such a way that allows legally purchased books to run properly.

 

[ghostlyorb]

Let us do what we want to do with our phones. Who cares about if it's jailbroken. I would love to see Apple get sued from the FCC or something regarding this. I mean it is LEGAL! If I legally purchased something, they have no right to not allow me access to it. I guess jailbreakers (like myself) will stop using iBooks, and go to kindle or something?

 

[nyfliiboy]

ibooks can kick rocks. Never have and never will use it

 

[notjustjay]

Book publishers require Apple to have some sort of piracy prevention if Apple is going to sell books. That's all there is to it.

I think this is it exactly.

 

[Watabou]

Next step: app store

That's what I think too.

I'll be avoiding 4.3 like the plague.

 

[MarximusMG]

Stupid thing to do.
I'm allowed to jailbreak my device - yet, Apple thinks that I'm not.

This is not going to stop people from jailbreaking, it's only going to stop people from using iBooks.

Doesn't matter to me though, since I use the Kindle app - automatic syncing between all devices, and a way bigger catalog > iBook Store

Absolutely right. This is only hurting Apple in the long run. Those of us with jailbroken devices will just not use iBooks and rather use the Kindle app. Whoever made this decision at Apple was a real dumbass.

 

[ugahairydawgs]

Let me clarify. Your logic is sensible and I'm not against it in anyway. I'm for Apple in this situation because I feel that they have the right to control services provided to their devices, and can deny service if their device is configured in a way that see unfitting (No shirt, no shoes, no service kind of deal). My views on this topic are in no way related to piracy.

If that is what Apple was doing I'd be more inclined to agree with you. In this instance though you are coming into Apple's restaurant with no shirt and no shoes, they are letting you pay for dinner, and then when it is time to eat they are telling you no dice.

If they just cutoff access to the iBook store (or even the App Store for that matter) it would be more in line with your example. What they are doing, though, is unseemly and underhanded and probably the precursor to them cutting off access to regular apps for jailbroken iPhones.

 

[Mr. Chewbacca]

The LOC's determination was that you cannot be civilly liable, under the DMCA, as an end-user, for jailbreaking (specifically, they established that behavior as an exemption to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions). That's it. Nothing more. I don't understand where you and the others are getting this idea that this somehow means that Apple or any other company cannot discourage/try to prevent/make consequences for jailbreaking. It just means that under ONE federal law, the DMCA, you cannot be liable for circumventing-by-jailbreak.

Please get your facts straight before repeating what is a certifiably incorrect position.

I understand that, with the huge agreement we have to sigh to activate the phone they can do just about anything legally. The question is should they?

Because it is not illegal to JB and I have never gotten any stolen content from my JB I am dissapointed that apple is not going after the ones that have stolen apps, books, music, ect.

I relly wish they would just put things like lockinfo, byte sms, folder enhanser on the legit app store, as it stands I'll pay who ever is selling it.

 

[paulypants]

Next step: app store

Now THAT would be something, I can just imagine the uproar from the jb 'community' ... would be fun to read through those comments

 

[RangerXML]

Boy am I glad I don't use iBooks, I prefer my Amazon Kindle app with syncing across all devices and Google Books.

 

[bbeagle]

However, this is going too far. If you purchase a book off of iBooks, but then jailbreak your device, your right to read that book shouldn't be revoked.

Your right to read the book has NOT been revoked. You can un-jailbreak your iPhone to read your purchased book. Then you can re-jailbreak your phone to do something else.

It's VERY inconvenient, but you can still read your book if you want to.

I think a good analogy would be:
You bought a year's worth of coffee from some coffee shop. You were going to the coffee shop every day, and used to them filling it up in YOUR ceramic cup, and now they change the rules where they must fill it in THEIR PAPER cup. Are your rights violated? No. definately not, but the same experience is not there from when you bought the year's worth of coffee. However, you can use a work-around, where you take the coffee in the paper cup and pour it into your ceramic cup.

This is similar to what Apple is doing. Your rights to read the book aren't infringed, but the WAY you can read it has changed.

 

[hayesk]

But the law does not agree with you, that is why the library of congress (not sure why they have the say) made it spicifically legal to jailbreak, even mentioned the dev team.

All the law says is it's legal for you to jailbreak. The law does not say Apple has to support their software on jail-broken devices. iBooks have system requirements. It's pretty clear that when a system requirement is iOS, it's referring to iOS in an unmodified form - i.e. not jail-broken. Otherwise you could rip out frameworks from the OS and claim Apple still has to make it work.

 

[jlmitnick]

I think it's more like, you are granted the use of a company car as part of your employment. But if you start modding the car in ways that the company does not expect (nor desire) they decide to take away the privilege.

The fact that you compare the ownership situation of buying and owning an iPhone to the ownership situation of you using a company car is just sad.

 

[thegman1234]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8C148)

Let me clarify. Your logic is sensible and I'm not against it in anyway. I'm for Apple in this situation because I feel that they have the right to control services provided to their devices, and can deny service if their device is configured in a way that see unfitting (No shirt, no shoes, no service kind of deal). My views on this topic are in no way related to piracy.

Do you think it would be okay if you had an iPhone 3G, bought some iBooks, and then a few years later Apple says that you can no longer view iBooks that you bought on the 3G, you must upgrade to an iPhone 4 or newer, and then proceeded to disable the viewing of iBooks on all 3Gs?

After all, Apple has the right to control the services it provides to its devices and has control over the means through which you must view legally purchased content.

That is a much different subject as continuing to use an outdated device is explicitly different than jailbreaking a device. But to answer your question, I feel that if Apple updated their iBooks software and system to the point where it became incompatible with older hardware, then Apple would be within their right and I'd need to comply to continue using their service.

 

[hayesk]

Because it is not illegal to JB and I have never gotten any stolen content from my JB I am dissapointed that apple is not going after the ones that have stolen apps, books, music, ect.

Or instead, Apple could close all the holes allowing jailbreak to work, and their perfectly in their right to, as it is their software.