Jailbreaking, rooting & hacking phones could become illegal again

Thanks to an exemption in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) jailbreaking or rooting your phone is legal if not a little risky. That exemption could run out soon and if it is not extended, it would make that activity once again illegal.

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It was back in July of 2010 that the US government decided that jailbreaking iPhones and rooting Android devices was not illegal as long as it was not done with the intention of breaking copyright. The exemption, added to the DMCA, defining this activity as legal will expire soon.

Another issue with the original exemption is that it didn’t seem to cover the iPad or any tablet for that matter. That means it’s legal to jailbreak your iPhone but not your iPad, which seems rather silly. It also means anyone rooting a Kindle Fire because they want a cheap Android tablet to play with is technically doing so illegally.

So what can you do to help keep this exemption in place? There is petition over at the Electronic Frontier Organization’s site that you can sign to keep jailbreaking and rooting a legal activity under the DMCA. This petition calls for the exemption to be extended and the scope to be expanded to include tablets.

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Do you jailbreak or root any of your devices? Let us know how essential that is to you in the comments.

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