Unlocking Your Phone Becomes Illegal on Sunday → Re: Crazy laws

I don't understand how they're actually going to know??

There are plenty of ways to unlock your phone, and if a company truly wants your business, they're not going to care.

This is going to have the unintended (or intended) consequence of destroying the secondary market (used) phones. This will do a few things:

1. If you can buy a phone off of ebay, CL, etc now all of a sudden you are taking a chance that by buying a phone, you now become an oulaw.
2. These new "protection" databases where carriers will be tracking "stolen" phones will be used as an intimidation tool by the mainline carriers to ban phones on their networks AND MVNO, and once they start sharing across the board.
3. Theoretically a carrier locking a phone should be illegal, because even if the phone is subsidized (leased) it is still your property. The action to make whole is the termination fee if one breaks a contract which is a CIVIL not CRIMINAL matter.

Did you hear any of the big guys complain- NO. They LOVE this, it artificially limits competition. It's like you have to scrap your 2 year old car and buy another new one (cash for clunkers), except the car still has robust economic value for many years....Guess what cars, phones, etc depreciate in value like heck in the first 2 years. I can buy a 2 year old phone that "cost" $500 for $100.

The imperial government is in the process of criminalizing civil matters so they can simply gain more control and the lobbyists use the congress and pres to be their hammer.

Copyright, etc are purely civil not criminal matters and breaking DRM is not breaking the law at all. By finding a hole in intellectual property (known as an INVENTION) that person who breaks the DRM should be filing a patent, not going to jail. Of course that is yet another way the government limits competition and the entrepreneurial spirit. And then we become Greece.

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.

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.

This what happens when Corporations write the laws. The write the laws to line their pockets.

The DMCA anti-circumvention laws have to be removed, period.