This is the first day so perhaps the news needs to spread out a bit more or perhaps a few more phone users need to run into this road block. We’ll see.  What I really hope is that consumers will start to realize the reason their cell phones service costs so much is because so many customers get locked into two year deals thus killing competition.  Sigh.  I think that hope is about as high as this petition getting signed.

If this is really important to you, you may want to run out and buy a phone right now because starting tmmw, its illegal. Now does that mean the phone police are going to come knocking on your door tomorrow? Not likely, but that will give them yet one more way to ‘not’ support your phone if something goes wrong. Also if you unlock phones as a business or worse, steal phones, them might find things getting a little more hot down the line.

The good thing is you can buy unlocked phones if you really need to be able to switch carriers and hate dealing with unlocking your phone. Also, there is not currently a software unlock for the latest iphone, so its not like its going to matter in the short term. That being said, there are services out there can unlock the phone for you be getting the unlock code, however I have never tried it on the current iphone 5.

Jailbreaking, most commonly referenced on iPhones, is where you modify the phone’s software/firmware to allow it to run programs other then Approved by the creator of the phones operating system. For example, you can go to the Apple App store on your iPhone and download a number of apps for free or at a price.  The key is Apple controls the App store and thus decides what can and cannot be made available to you.  However, if you employ a software tool like ‘PwnageTool‘ you can download any app you want. There is even an app store just for jailbroken apps called Cydia. This is still legal although frowned upon by Apple and of course not at all supported.

Unlocking your iphone is where you use a software tool, normally created by the same people that created the jailbreaking tools, will allow you to use whatever phone service that is supported by your phone type.  So if you have a phone that takes a sim card, odd are you can use a sim card from another carrion in your country. Some phones are called ‘international’ phones and can support a number of broadbands, so if you unlock your phone, you can take it overseas and use it there.

THIS is what is going to be illegal tomorrow in the US for all new phones.  Now is this a big deal?  Not likely. If you buy say a sprint phone and need to use it overseas, odds are they will unlock the phone for you as a service for free. Also, if you unlocked an AT$T phone, would the phone police come after you?  Doubt it.  Not really worth their time.  However, they may go after people who provide this as a service or those that steal phones and unlock it so that it can be sold?  These guys may want to watch there backs.

So a number of iOS development shoppes have been graced with the reception of 100 page documents basically threatening to sue if they do not work out some sort of license agreement with this company in 21 days!  And here I thought blackmail was illegal.  But wait!  It gets better…

Seems that as a developer, you cannot agree to such a contract because  the Apple agreement (which as we all know is pretty restricive) because ‘to do so, according to the iOS developer agreement, could in some way “[affect] Apple’s rights or [bind] Apple in any way.” ‘    Wow..

Basically there is nothing the iOS dev’s can do but simply forward the complaints to Apple.  Now, keep in mind, this Patent will apply to ALL platforms.  That means Android, Windows, WebOS etc…  So I have a feeling this little trolling firm is going to feel some real heat really soon from the major palyers.  But that is just the symptom.  The fact these stupid ‘obvious’ patents are still out there is the disease.  I’m not foolish enough to think anything in our patent system is going to change after this, but if ONE thing comes out of this, there HAS to be a way to deal with outdated patents that protect ‘obvious’ use as society’s use of technology and adoption continue to evolve and mature at an ever expanding rate.

No word from Apple or anyone else yet, but you know those of use in the development world are going to be watching this.

Apple’s copyright infringement claim starts with the observation that jailbroken iPhones depend on modified versions of Apple’s bootloader and operating system software. True enough — we said as much in our technical white paper describing the jailbreak process. But the courts have long recognized that copying software while reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software, a body of law that Apple conveniently fails to mention.

Its the last bit we want to focus on, ‘copying software while reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software’. All those jailbreak app you are running fall into this category.

As to the DMCA claim Apple makes, John make a very good point aurguing FUD. ‘ ... One need only transpose Apple’s arguments to the world of automobiles to recognize their absurdity. Sure, GM might tell us that, for our own safety, all servicing should be done by an authorized GM dealer using only genuine GM parts ….’

Now I do not expect the legal games to end here.  Apple makes ~.30 for every $1.00 sold in the Apple store, so its very much in their interest to have ALL applications sold through them. However, part of what makes the iphone popular is some of the applications that Apple is trying to block. If you were to look at my top 10 jailbreak apps list,  you can see why.