I USA har Library of Congress deklarerat att jailbreak är ok att göra under rätten till ”fair use”. Vad Library of Congress fokuserade på var om jailbreak var ett brott mot Apples copyright eller fair use och de kom alltså fram till att det inte var något brott.
Ars Technica har skrivit bra om detta:
The most surprising ruling was on ”jailbreaking” one’s phone (exemption number two), replacing the company-provided operating system with a hacked version that has fewer limitations. Make no mistake: this was all about Apple. And Apple lost.
[…]
”Apple is not concerned that the practice of jailbreaking will displace sales of its firmware or of iPhones,” wrote the Register, explaining her thinking by running through the ”four factors” of the fair use test. ”Indeed, since one cannot engage in that practice unless one has acquired an iPhone, it would be difficult to make that argument. Rather, the harm that Apple fears is harm to its reputation. Apple is concerned that jailbreaking will breach the integrity of the iPhone’s ecosystem. The Register concludes that such alleged adverse effects are not in the nature of the harm that the fourth fair use factor is intended to address.”
Vad gäller den lilla del av jailbreak som kräver copyrightskyddad kod från Apple säger Library of Congress:
And the Register concluded that a jailbroken phone used ”fewer than 50 bytes of code out of more than 8 million bytes, or approximately 1/160,000 of the copyrighted work as a whole. Where the alleged infringement consists of the making of an unauthorized derivative work, and the only modifications are so de minimis, the fact that iPhone users are using almost the entire iPhone firmware for the purpose for which it was provided to them by Apple undermines the significance” of Apple’s argument.
Jailbreak när det gäller iPhone handlar om att knäcka Apples spärrar mot att kunna installera egna program på telefonen, program som inte Apple godkänt.
I praktiken gör detta beslut inte så stor skillnad, men det är en viktig principiell seger för rätten att hacka en produkt man köpt och att det inte går att likställa med annan olaglig verksamhet som t.ex. piratkopiering.
