Rich Fiscus
14 Feb 2009 12:41
After staying notably silent on the subject of jailbreaking for the first year and a half of the iPhone's existence, Apple has now submitted a document to the Library of Congress claiming that reverse engineering the iPhone's operating system is copyright infringemnt.
Their claim is in response to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's submission for the annual DMCA exemption review. Under the DMCA, the Library of Congress is allowed to allow selected activities which would normally be forbidden by the DMCA. Due to encryption used for various bits of software in it, the reverse engineering require to jailbreak the iPhone OS falls under that cateogory.
The EFF is requesting an exemption for "Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute lawfully obtained software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications with computer programs on the telephone handset."
Apple's response indicates that they consider such an exemption inappropriate because it would violate their copyrights. As the EFF points out,"Running lawfully obtained software on a smart phone does not infringe copyright, nor does the process of jailbreaking a smart phone in order to accomplish this goal."
Apple's argument against this is that the iTunes App Store provides plenty of choice. The problem with this position is that it's ultimately Apple who gets to decide what's available,not developers or consumers. They reserve the right to turn down programs, or even remove them at any time.