The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is asking for your help to tell the U.S. Copyright Office that jailbreaking does not violate the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and its exemption should be continued and expanded.

In 2010, the Copyright Office said jailbreaking smartphones doesn’t violate the DMCA. This year, we’re asking them to renew that exemption (otherwise it will expire) and expand it to cover tablets. We’re also asking for a new exemption to allow jailbreaking of video game consoles.

The Library of Congress added the exception for jailbreak to the DMCA in July of 2010. Specifically:

Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.

However, jailbreak was declared as an exclusion from the DMCA, and protection wasn’t actually hard coded into the act. That means the declaration could ultimately expire and leave jailbreakers subject to legal penalties.

If you’d like to help ensure this never happens, the EFF has advised you submit your opinion in comment form to the Copyright Office, and even offer a submission template with comment suggestions for your convenience. Comments are due by February 10th at 5PM, so make sure you submit your comments soon!

Souce: EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called on Apple to be developers’ knight in shining armor in face of threats from patent trolls. As TiPb covered in our special edition iPhone Live podcast with FOSS Patent’s Florian Mueller, iOS developers including James Thomson of PCalc and the Iconfactory, makers of Twitterrific have received letters from patent holding company, Lodsys, asking for licensing fees for the use of in-app purchases for in-app upgrades. The EFF sees that position as untenable:

This is a problem that lawyers call a misallocation of burden. The law generally works to ensure that the party in the best position to address an issue bears the responsibility of handling that issue. In the copyright context, for example, the default assumption is that the copyright owners are best positioned to identify potential infringement. This is because, among other reasons, copyright owners know what content they own and which of their works have been licensed. Here, absent protection from Apple, developers hoping to avoid a legal dispute must investigate each of the technologies that Apple provides to make sure none of them is patent-infringing. For many small developers, this requirement, combined with a 30 percent fee to Apple, is an unacceptable cost. Even careful developers who hire lawyers to do full-scale patent searches on potential apps surely would not expect to investigate the technology that Apple provides. Instead, they would expect (with good reason) that Apple wouldn’t provide technologies in its App Store that open its developers up to liability – and/or would at least agree to defend them when a troll like Lodsys comes along.

The golden bullet would be indemnification by Apple for any use of the SDK, but given Apple’s inability to predict every contingency a developer could come up with, that may not be realistic for a public company. Neither is hoping patent holding companies will restrict their demands to deep pockets, or that the system itself gets overhauled in anything approaching a reasonable time frame.

What’s left for developers to do?

[EFF via Daring Fireball]

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) petitioned NASA (an iPhone developer – iTunes link) under the Freedom of Information Act to provide them with a copy of Apple’s iPhone SDK License Agreement, and have gone through and provided both a link to the agreement (an older version, provided at the time of the request) and some analysis of what it contains.

For those not familiar with the document, it contains the legal terms a developer must agree to before they can develop for the iPhone platform. Since the EFF and Apple have been duking it out over Jailbreaking for a while now — the EFF wants Jailbreaking to be made an official exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Apple has opposed that move — the EFF thinks the SDK agreement is particularly interesting at the moment.

The major points brought out and up by the EFF include:

• One rule of the SDK license agreement is you can’t talk about the SDK license agreement. Despite it not being “Apple confidential information” developers are contractually prohibited from discussing it in public.
• Apps developed using the SDK can only be released through the iTunes App Store. So if Apple rejects you for any reason, according to their own guidelines or just on whim, you can’t release via Jailbreak or on a competing platform (if any were compatible).
• No reverse engineering or helping others reverse engineer, even where such actions have legal precedent as exceptions to copyright.
• No hacking or helping hack any Apple products. That means no Jailbreaking the iPhone, no putting Boxee on your AppleTV, no loading Linux on your iPod Classic.
• Kill switch is informed in the agreement. Apple can revoke your certificate at any time. (Though they’ve yet to ever do this).
• If Apple messes up and owes a developer damages, those damages will never exceed $50, so good luck suing for millions over your rejected Sexy App or RSS Template.

The EFF is none to pleased at the one-sided, gate-kept, stifling terms of the SDK Licensing agreement and good for them. And good for us as well. The way we look at it we need the opposing forces of Apple Legal and the EFF always pushing for more on both sides. Apple’s going to want to protect themselves as much as possible and the EFF is going to want to show us every way they’re doing it so if we don’t like it, we can voice our concerns as well.

We’ve used the analogy of restaurants before. The iPhone is Apple’s boutique, haut-cuisine eatery. They set the menu. You can’t go there, demand a burger, and then throw a fit when they tell you they don’t serve it. (Well you can, but you’d be nuts — Apple’s not in the business of serving burgers). Instead of Gordon Ramsey you get Steve Jobs crafting your dining experience, and if you go there, that’s what you should expect — to trade control for ease of use (as opposed to Google where you trade privacy for free service). However, the EFF making sure the ingredients are what we’re told they are, and that the kitchen is kept clean and compliant with local ordinances — that’s good for us, and ultimate it’s good for Apple.

Check out the EFF article, take a look at the agreement, and let us know what you think.

[Thanks to Fassy for the tip!]

Back in February we brought to you the story about Apple saying that Jailbreaking your iPhone is illegal. Granted that was in response the (Electronic Frontier Foundation), and their filing an exemption request for Jailbreaking iPhones. (See the AIPLA Quarterly Journal’s article on this from last week). Well this past Friday Apple’s head of marketing, Greg Joswiak, faced off against Fred von Lohmann, the EFF’s copyright guru and a plethora of Copyright Office officials. The topic? Jailbreaking…

The following is a little taste of what Apple had to say:

Apple is opposed to the proposed Class #1 exemption because it will destroy the technological protection of Apple’s key copyrighted computer programs in the iPhone™ device itself and of copyrighted content owned by Apple that plays on the iPhone, resulting in copyright infringement, potential damage to the device and other potential harmful physical effects, adverse effects on the functioning of the device, and breach of contract. The proponents of the exemption have also not satisfied their burden of proof of showing harm to non-infringing uses of the copyrighted works protected by the technological protection measures on the iPhone. In addition, because Congress has already explicitly addressed circumvention for interoperability in Section 1201(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),4 the Copyright Office should not create interoperability exemptions outside that statutory structure, at least without a clear showing of specific and significant harm, which has not been put forth here.

The way we see this is that Apple is against Jailbreaking for the simple fact that it can and will cost them money. Common sense will tell you that Apple does not get any money from iPhone users if they do not use the App Store for installing applications and they also run the risk of legit App Store apps being pirated, which we have already seen. So TiPb can see where Apple is coming from but at the end of the day, if you purchase an iPhone or any other device for that matter, it is yours to do with what ever you’d like.

For a complete rundown of all the shenanagins that took place this past Friday be sure to check out Wired.com’s Jailbreaking Showdown.

[Via Wired.com]

Apple Insider reports that the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) is helping OdioWorks LLC file suit in an attempt to get Apple to stop threatening to sue them. Complicated much?

OdioWorks, which runs the free and open wiki service BluWiki, wants to bar Apple from repeatedly threatening its own legal action simply for letting BluWiki users host a wiki for iTunesDB, a project to learn about iTunes’ database file system and create third-party software that can replicate the sync functionality of iTunes for iPhones and iPods without forcing users to run Apple’s own media software. Over the course of several months, Apple has claimed the very existence of iTunesDB violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s rules on circumventing copyright locks and, in November, successfully frightened OdioWorks into taking down the wiki entries.

EFF says it’s legal to hack code to increase competition — i.e. to allow an iPhone to work outside of iTunes. Is it also legal to hack bank accounts and transfer large sums of money so my net worth is more competitive with Bill Gates?

Not the same thing, of course, just pointing out that while I’d personally love Apple to open-source more of their code, the way they’ve done with OpenCL, CardDAV, CalDAV, etc. it’s still their code. As much as I don’t want to live in a corporate-controlled world where big business owns the rights to math, I also don’t want to live in a world where the over-entitled populace thinks they can take whatever they want. Because, if either side gets too extreme, what’s to stop them from targeting me next?

Other than the fact that I’ve never made or hacked any code worth stealing or knowing…