Unlocking Your Phone Becomes Illegal on Sunday

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.

I can see this creating a huge market for the 'pure' Google Nexus devices, as they all come unlocked already. In fact, it was the deciding factor in my buying the Nexus S. No begging the carrier, and no money spent for a third party unlock.

Maybe when the cell providers start losing enough profit off their device sales, they'll see the folly of their ways. As it stands, I can see this creating a lot of 'criminals' in the interim by unlocking their hardware for travel.

No, this issue really only applies to a small target. iphones, particularly on Sprint, and some on Verizon. They are locked so that they cannot be used on ATT and T-mobile even though they have sim card slots and have the ability to work. The exemption would allow a user to circumvent the lock and use their phone on a domestic network. That is expiring tomorrow.

Virtually every other phone can already be unlocked legally by the carrier/manufacturer, often well before a contract expires.

In my opinion you either don't do business with carriers that refuse to unlock your device, or you choose devices the carriers will unlock (if any).

Sprint and Verizon refuse to allow phones from each others network to be activated. ATT will take devices from other networks but will force you into a plan they deem appropriate for your device (usually mandating a data plan). T-mobile is the lone star here that allows you to bring any device and use it with any plan (including non data plans) and they don't have any devices they will not unlock upon request.

I have had valve unregister games from my account and make them into gift codes which can be sold, legally, even according to their TOS, as long as they don't know, your in the clear. You just need to get the right person in support. I don't think Valve was 100% at fault for this change at all either. Once game companies started using online registration and one time use game CD keys, the second hand market for PC games was already dying. Its a bad comparison too, because it does not kill the second hand market, phones will just be carrier locked, so if you will now have to look for a phone to use on a specific carrier as well as what other features you want.

Also, have any of these laws ever prevented anyone from unlocking or jailbreaking their phones? the DMCA laws are outdated and need to be rewritten, the only problem is that they will only get worse, because lobbyist have more money than you or I.

The thing with Valve is they focus on a market that never had a big secondary market to begin with. PC gaming has never had a big used game market. Consoles have had a huge used market even since the SNES. And it really took off in the Playstation era.

And yet no one will keep a database of stolen phones to completely shut out stolen phones from the market.

If this really is an iPhone related issue, who in their right mind would want an iPhone or Apple product in the future?

Sorry but its my phone ill do as a please with it like telling me i cant put a ford engine in my chevy eat me

I have TMO service. I have bought unlocked European phones from Amazon and used them on TMO. One was a Nokia C6, not sold here, The other a Samsung Apollo, also not sold here. The Samsung was in the Czech language. I now have the unlocked Nexus S, and will get the Nexus 4.

...sales of Google's unlocked Nexus 4 phone are starting to climb again.

Pretty sure that extends to all phones, not just Apple.

What copyright material protected by DRM is there on my Android (open-source) smart-phone though.