http://www.pcworld.com/article/2026236/phone-unlocking-ban-could-could-hit-you-in-the-wallet.html
See for yourself. :eek:
The link is hanging for me, probably because of traffic which may be resulting in an unintended denial of service attack on PC World. Is “unlocking” the same as “rooting” in the Android world? If it is then I had no idea the LOC had that much power!
How would it be enforced?
I got the link off google news and you are probably right. It basically says that you as a consumer cannot unlock your phone, say a used phone to another provider like a prepaid thing. Unlocking is not the same as rooting. Unlocking allows you to take a phone to a different provider
Rooting allows you to “get under the hood” of the phone and remove crapware, stuff like that.
I didn’t know about the LoC thing either but apparently, this dude interprets the DMCA, and has some power
It’s the congressional librarian, not the Library of Congress. He seems to be in charge of the LoC, but acting in a role assigned by congress. So I guess it’s not much of a difference.
Ahh, so he’s not just huddled in the back room cataloging the greatest works of literature…he is a bad dude…
I meant, the Librarian of Congress. I forgot that LOC means the library.
I can’t find the piece I read about this a while ago, but someone was talking about this as a kind of power grab tactic by congress to keep the decision in their domain instead of having the FCC (maybe? or the courts?) control this.
Quote from the article:
“That decision was made not by voters, the courts, or even Congress. It was made by one man, 83-year-old Congressional Librarian James Hadley Billington, who is responsible for interpreting the meaning of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)”
I did not know that one person had so much input into interpretation of the DMCA, which is a far reaching Act.
I wonder how many songs he downloaded from Napster.
Good point. Makes me wonder if this is because they want the RIAA et al lobbying money..
Who’s the cat who won’t unlock
All the cell phones on the block?
Jim!
Can you dig it?
He’s a LibrariAN
and no one understands him but his iPad
.
.
.
I guess that sort of sucks, but it’s not like they’ve made unlocked phones illegal and despite the fact that the article seems to imply that they will disappear and become unavailable (my reading of it anyway), I’m sure just the opposite will happen.
I always thought that signing up for a 2 year contract was stupid anyway. The technology changes too rapidly to warrant spending $600 on a phone - even if it does only cost you a couple hundred out of pocket initially with the contract. And if you’re at the other end of the spectrum where you’re limited to looking at something that’s free with a contract or at least very cheap, then you probably don’t care much about unlocking anyway.
The thing I don’t get is though is this. Why isn’t the penalty they charge for terminating the agreement early a sufficient disincentive that there are so many people who want to break their agreement. I mean I happy that’s not the case. It’s nice to see the oligopolists take it up the ass once in a while - at least temporarily. I just thought that those penalties would be calculated such that you would end up paying the retail price of the phone if you left anyway, so you would have to be pretty well into a contract for it not to hurt.
I forgot to respond to this, thanks. I’m glad to know that rooting’s still OK, because it’s almost imperative to get the most out of an Android device.