Fight Over Jailbreaking iPhone Draws a Crowd
By Zusha Elinson
The Recorder
May 5, 2009
Hearings held by the low-profile U.S. Copyright Office probably won't ever be carried live on CNN.
But Friday's airing of grievances about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in a basement room at Stanford Law School drew more than the small requisite crowd of copyright nerds because of a big fight over jailbreaking Apple's iPhone.
Apple sent Fenwick & West's David Hayes to prevent the Copyright Office from making an exemption to the DMCA for jailbreaking -- that is, cracking the iPhone software so users can download software applications that aren't approved or sold by Apple. The company argues that jailbreaking is a violation of the DMCA provision that prohibits circumventing technological protections of copyrighted works.
San Francisco's
Electronic Frontier Foundation is the thorn in Apple's side that requested the change in the law...
