Jailbreaking iPhone Legal, U.S. Government Says

July 27, 2010— -- Federal regulators lifted a cloud of uncertainty when they announced it was lawful to hack or "jailbreak" an iPhone, declaring Monday there was "no basis for copyright law to assist Apple in protecting its restrictive business model."

Jailbreaking is hacking the phone's OS to allow consumers to run any app on the phone they choose, including applications not authorized by Apple.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation asked regulators 19 months ago to add jailbreaking to a list of explicit exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions.

At stake for Apple is the very closed business model the company has enjoyed since 2007, when the iPhone debuted. Apple says it's unlawful to jailbreak, but has not taken legal action against the millions who have jailbroken their phones and used the underground app store Cydia.

Apple maintains that its closed marketplace is what made the success of the iPhone possible, and sold more than three billion apps. Apple also told regulators that the nation's cellphone networks could suffer "potentially catastrophic" cyberattacks by iPhone-wielding hackers at home and abroad (.pdf) if iPhone owners are permitted to legally jailbreak their shiny wireless devices.

Every three years, the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Office entertain proposed exemptions to the DMCA, passed in 1998. The act forbids circumventing encryption technology to copy or modify copyrighted works. In this instance, Apple claimed the DMCA protects the copyrighted encryption built into the bootloader that starts up the iPhone OS operating system.

But the Copyright Office concluded that, "while a copyright owner might try to restrict the programs that can be run on a particular operating system, copyright law is not the vehicle for imposition of such restrictions."

Jay Freeman, who runs Cydia, said about nine million iPhones have his alternative marketplace installed on their phones.

"If there was something on the books that jailbreaking was not exempt, that would be painful," Freeman said. The Dev-Team, one of the main groups offering free iPhone hacks, declared Monday's development as "fantastic news."