An A For The F

I remember when the name FCC made me think of puritanical censorship standards. But they actually came up with good policy regarding digital rights and technology.

The biggest splash yesterday was when the FCC announced that it had made the controversial practice of “jailbreaking” your cell phone legal.

Jailbreaking is "the practice of unlocking a phone so it can be used on another network and/or run other applications than those approved by the manufacturer", and has technically been illegal for years. Most jailbroken phones are Apple iPhones and are used on the (U.S.) T-Mobile network or on overseas carriers. Common jailbroken phone uses are to run applications that Apple refuses to sell, such as Safari ad-blocking apps, alternate keyboard layouts, or programs that change the interface to the iPhone's SMS system and the way its icons are laid out.

Estimated are that more than a million iPhone owners have jailbroken their phones. While technically illegal, no one has been sued or prosecuted for the practice - though Steve Jobs and company will void your warranty if they discover your iPhone was jailbroken. Apple fought hard against the legalization, arguing that jailbreaking was a form of copyright violation. The FCC disagreed, saying that jailbreaking merely "enhanced the inter-operability" of the phone, and was therefore legitimate under fair-use rules.

Basically, anyone can jailbreak or otherwise unlock any cell phone without fear of legal penalties, whether you want to install unsupported applications or switch to another cellular carrier. Cell phone companies will likely make it difficult for you to do this, but at least you don't need to saddle up to a carrier you don't want just because they have your favorite phone. In addition to the jailbreaking exemption, there were other positive announcements:

• Professors, students and documentary filmmakers are now allowed, for “noncommercial” purposes, to break the copy protection measures on DVDs to be used in classroom or other not-for-profit environments.

• Computer owners to bypass dongles (hardware devices used in conjunction with software to guarantee the correct owner is behind the keyboard) if they are no longer in operation and can’t be replaced. Dongles are rare for consumer technology products now, but industrial users should have a nerd boner.

• People (read:h4x0rs) are now free to circumvent protection measures on video games — but only to investigate and correct security flaws in those games. Sorry, computer software is not part of this ruling, just video games.