Unlocking Your Phone Becomes Illegal on Sunday

So if I cannot unlock my phone to bring to another carrier at the end of my contract, I assume the carrier I bought it from will buy the phone back from me at full retail?

much more then just that. Think must go to dealer for any work on the car and you can't even do a DIY oil change.

And if they want to real dicks you must only buy the gas we say to.

The student wasn't "tuning" or otherwise changing books. Simply importing them and reselling them. If that can be prohibited, so can reselling an imported car.

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I guess people with Sprint iPhones are SOL because Sprint will not unlock iPhones for domestic SIM usage. International yes but try and get an off contract phone unlocked so you can use a T-Mobile or AT&T SIM and you are screwed.

The 4s CDMA is locked to Vz/Sprint by the ESN. in theory they could let you use a Sprint phone on Vz..but they won't. The SIM in the Iphone 4s CDMA version IIRC is only used for overseas.

You will still see people unlocking phones and using them. Do you think this is going to stop the huge demand in other countries for unlocked phones from US? That is a big multi million dollar business, people still will unlock their phones.

CDMA phones are not really technically locked like GSM phones can be. The way those carriers handle those phones is to simply refuse to activate a device not sold through them. So while your Sprint iphone could be up and running on verizon without any changes to the phone. Verizon refuses to allow any Sprint MEID's on their network. And vice versa.

If you wanted to take a sprint phone and move it to cricket or metro pcs, those carriers will often activate phones from other carriers on their network. I do believe though that while they used to now Apple has forced Cricket to agree not to activate iphones from other carriers as it as cutting down on iPhone users purchasing new iphones and digging into Apple's profit.

I understand that Sprint will not factory unlock your iphone's GSM portion to use on tmobile or ATT. This is probably to keep the phone in a state where it can only be used for sprint revenue. Given the insanely terrible iphone contract Sprint signed I cannot imagine them ever relenting on that.

Your best bet is probably to sell off the 4s, and get a better phone. You would probably come out money ahead swapping to a Verizon galaxy nexus, or pitch in 50-100 and you could probably get a verizon gs3 if that's the way you want to go. However, if you are going to get a phone off contract you may as well save money. So i would look at tmobiles monthly 4g, straight talk, and the like that will run you 30-50 dollars a month for talk/txt/web

Wow that's unfortunate. So you are saying, that even when my contract is up, I would not be able to use my same device on Verizon, or for that matter any network even GSM networks such as AT&T, even if I contacted sprint? That doesn't seem right to me, but I suppose it's a good reason to purchase a fully unlocked iPhone 5 then, if my current device is stuck on sprint here in the US. To be clear, I don't hate sprint, I just was hoping to have the option when my contract is up, to go to another domestic carrier if I choose with my same device. Guess that can't happen with sprint. Very silly in my book.

It may be simple to avoid, I myself don't have to worry about this as much as I'm on a byod sim prepaid plan, I can just buy an unlocked device, but the truth is that many phones on ebay are used phones, many of which were carrier subsidized. and used carrier phones are normally cheaper than the full unlocked versions. This move could kill a substantial part of the second hand market.

This is about greed, carriers can make it harder to switch by refusing to unlock your phone, even if your contract is up or you've left and paid the etf, which in reality pays for the rest of your subsidized phone not the mention the boom for phone manufacturers to increase sales, as more phones become harder to resell.

With T-mobile's refarm and bring your own device promotion. I fully expect AT&T to start refusing to unlock phones, regardless of your contract being over. Verizon and Sprint may be better about it, as their phones aren't easily moved from one carrier to another. It's anticompetitive and anticonsumer, they shouldn't have the right to tell you what you can do with a device you own.

This is the situation I was curious about. I wonder why sprint is unwilling to allow a full unlock of off contract phones for domestic use? Once my contract is up, why can't I decide which carrier I want to use my device with? So when my contract is up at the end of this year, my device will remain stuck on sprint's network, even though I may want to go prepaid or just have another carrier option to connect my device to in the U.S? And even though sprint and Verizon use CDMA, my sprint phone will never ever be able to connect to VZ? So much for getting more choices out of my device once my contract expires, unless of course I travel. It all seems rediculous, and I wonder what the point of that is.

I fully plan on counter lawsuit under fair-use rules.

Will this apply to second hand phones that originated from a carrier? Will this prevent carriers themselves from unlocking phones for their customers?

which means the price I get for my directly purchased phones when I sell them on ebay will go up quite a bit!

Destroying the secondary market is the same thing Steam has done for video games. unless you make a steam account for each game.

Phone companies will probably be happy with this for a few years while it pushes up their sales. But in the long run its going to make people just stop buying phones from them.

Unlocking a phone isn't about software ownership. It's about hardware. You own your phone, and it's provider lock has nothing to do with what software it's running. Your position means you couldn't mod your own computer if you were running windows or mac os, and we know that simply isn't true. Plus, this ridiculous restriction has nothing to do with jailbreaking a phone, which will still be legal, which IMO, makes the restriction on unlocking a phone just plain stupid and shows just how out of touch these people making such baseless and arbitrary rules really are.

I really can't see this surviving any kind of legal challenge, especially with jailbreaking still being allowed. I think they're undermining their own arbitrary law making with that.

Or an imported anything for that matter.

It seems that way after reading the pdf. They are trying to stop a practice of a company buying used phones which are out of contract and therefore can be unlocked and are later sold in other countries for full price.

Therefore they are now not required (by my understanding) to unlock that phone even after contract is up.

So in short consumers should now buy unlocked and not subsidized phones. If carriers don't want to activate your unlocked device because their firmware is not on the phone then they could also tell you to go screw yourself.

Which damages the used cellphone market and will also give carriers greater control of what devices are on the network and how they are used.

In the process though it gives us less options so they can feel safer. It's also a indirect benefit for handset makers and allows for the use of backdoors because it's "Their firmware".

If I choose to purchase let's say... a T-Mobile-branded phone from eBay. The seller on eBay states the phone can be activated without contract. The phone may or may not ship with original software from T-Mobile. I receive said phone and install a SIM from a T-Mobile MVNO like Simple Mobile and it works fine. I'm still breaking the law anyway?

Some of these phones are rooted and flashed with custom ROMs that work much better, but that's now illegal as of Sunday?

How can this be remotely enforceable anyway? They're now going to access everyone's phones OTA and take a peek at the software version and build?

i am wondering how this will affect phone flashing on CDMA carriers.

is it safe to assume that an SPC of '000000' is already considered unlocked?

changing the SPC would be illegal?

that would make flashing verizon postpaid phones to cricket or metropcs legal, but flashing sprint or verizon prepaid illegal.

or would writing a PRL of a different carrier be illegal?

or perhaps since setting data sometimes requires a bit of hacking on certain phone model talk and text is legal but data illegal?

i wonder if metro and cricket will just stop accepting flashed phone all together, although i imagine that would put most of the same mom & pop shops out of business since flashing is the one area they have an edge to compete against the corporate owned stores.

DMCA severely restricts fair-use rights in that if DRM infringes on copyright DMCA says tough bananas. To round this out companies use contractual wording to undercut first-sale doctrine.

The goal is to turn the population into renters with no property rights so companies are able to collect rent.

Be interesting to see how this plays out over the next decade as companies and government continue to tighten the screws.

/tom

Or crashing the economy.

well those who crashed the economy own the government so they could murder people and just buy a law that makes it legal for wall street to murder people.

This is why the DMCA is never going to be enforced. It would never stand up to a full and proper court review if someone got dragged in for ripping DVDs to their home server and never once sharing the files or even the physical DVD. In fact I think any case that could drag the DMCA before a proper court review would result in it going away.

Okay not really as the SCOTUS is now a division of big business. After all corporations are people too according to the supremes

I would not want to be the police chief that has to send my officers away from real cop work to chase down people selling Hondas on Craigs List.

I have no idea what is up with Sprint and their policy. My 4S is off contact in October and I may appeal directly to Apple, as many AT&T customers did, to get a full unlock. Basically an off contract Sprint iPhone is usable domestically only with Sprint or with any SIM outside the United States. My guess is because they have not yet been smacked as AT&T has, they have continued the policy. Come October, it will be two years since Sprint started selling iPhones and that will be the real test to see if their policy sticks. If people start requesting full unlocks at that time and keep getting denied, that may force people like me to go directly to Apple for assistance.

When are these morons going to realize that they are only pushing more people into piracy with this crap?

On the plus side they are helping the other companies out there who will come with ways to get around this by increasing demand for their stuff.

Interesting... All this time I have been purchasing computers that come preinstalled with Windows, wiping the disk, and installing Linux.

Does that make me a criminal too?

My guess is that, presuming the ruling stands as is, that individuals who unlock their phone won't be pursued in courts, but that services that offer to unlock phones may be. It's just like pirating. The individuals that do it aren't worth the time/effort to actually prosecute/sue in court...even with a victory what can be recovered or actual damages is far less then what the legal fees are. It's the bigger services that would be guilty of willful violation, or many counts is where the money could be at, if it ever came down to it.

Personally, I think it's a non-issue for 99.9% of the population. Most people have lived with locked cell phones for some time. With different technologies, frequencies, etc along with contracts, people stay with their same carrier for most or all of their contract. If/when they change, they get a new phone, trade in the old, donate it, or resell it to someone on the same carrier. Plus, with my experience with T-Mobile, after I think it's 90 days of good standing they will unlock it for you if you say pretty please or lie that you are taking it overseas.

T-mobile seems to be bucking the trend, going the opposite way. Their plans of not subsidizing phones, allowing you to BYOD, and an arguably leading pre-paid plan among the big 4 providers to me shows that they really don't care specifically about the "renting the hardware" market while they first rather provide the service. If you want to get the hardware from them, then they are happy to do that as well.