You may have read our recent article on third party application developers being banned from the App store by Apple for the seemingly benign act of unlocking or “jailbreaking” their iPhone. The fact of the matter is that this is causing quite a bit of commotion around the internet, on various forums and blogs worldwide, people are up in arms, expressing the view that: this isn’t really fair.
So, when you jailbreak your device, it opens up a whole myriad of options to the user.
You can download and install third-party applications, such as SNES emulators to play games or more complicated word processors or programs that use the camera. This gives the user a better experience with their device, and undeniably makes the iPhone way more fun to use.
Copyrights, the Law, and Who Owns What
A lot of people take the view that jailbreaking an iPhone is not fundamentally illegal. This is however currently disputed, the dispute itself and has reached as far as the law courts, but more on that later. Of course, jailbreaking will void the warranty if your gadget breaks, and sending a jailbroken iPhone to iPhone is a bit silly. Fair enough, if you tampered with the device, Apple cannot accept responsibility for your actions.
Apple itself has made a very strong and clear statement that:
“Any circumvention of the software protection mechanisms on the iPhone, even doing it to your own for the purpose of running your own software, is an illegal copyright violation”
Okay, fair enough, but how is it? Apple claims that jailbroken iPhones depend on modified versions of Apple’s bootloader and operating system software, and thus is a breach of copyright, but, as long as you’re not going out and selling these modified files, this can’t be a breach of copyright. Nobody is actually stealing any intellectual property and purporting it as their own here, which is the first and foremost principle of copyright law. Jailbreakers have paid for, with their money, for the iPhone, so surely they own all its hardware, software and applications… so does this mean that Apple is disputing the very ownership of the devices we own?
Of course, doing this would be very, very silly. Apple developed it, we bought it. So we own it.
Without us, there wouldn’t be an Apple, and maybe the company needs to remember that, which is why people are getting so angry. This lack of respect for the consumer is upsetting many iPhone users, Apple fans or otherwise.
However, Apple’s viewpoint is that users own the hardware, but software is subject to intellectual property law, so consumers don’t “own” the software as such, but rather are licensed to use it. But many people have already managed to bypass this by placing a disclaimer on productions that use other people’s intellectual property and crediting the original creator for the property’s inclusion. Whether jailbreak app developers have done this isn’t clear but you can see where Apple is coming from on this occasion.
For more information on legality and jailbreaking, here are some detailed articles from the good people at iPhonespies.com
http://www.iphonespies.com/iphone-reviews/is-it-illegal-to-jailbreak-your-iphone/
http://www.iphonespies.com/iphone-hacks/why-jailbreak-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch/
Examples of Where Third-Party Modifications Have Worked
What springs to mind in many tech-savvy people is the good old US software backup laws, which allow users of software, most notably video games, to back up fully working copies of the game to their hard drive. If your disc gets scratched and doesn’t work, you are fully entitled to download a working copy from the net. So, maybe our iPhone software can be backed up too. Remember, we own it.
Apple might also consider a paralell from the gaming industry. For years, advanced gamers have built modifications and plugins for their games. They are basically taking the software they bought and are modifying it for their personal use… sounds familiar, no?
Some companies have even welcomed this, most notably Bethesda softworks, known widley for the best-selling Elder Scrolls series, and the blockbusting Fallout 3. All their games are shipped with a free developer kit, letting any PC user build a mod for their software. There are even sites where users distribute their plugins to the masses on a huge scale, with Bethesda meanwhile, still selling their games for years to come. In fact, their game Morrowind, which uses this model, is still selling fairly well, with a millions-strong fanbase and hundreds of thousands of mods avaliable to all, despite it being released eight years ago in 2002.
Yet another example of the third-party applications model working well concerns Sony’s PSP.
Custom firmware which is freely avaliable on the web allows a hefty amount of extra content to be installed to the PSP, including emulators and the like. I even saw someone playing one of the original Pokemon games on one a few years back.
So, could Apple learn from this? Could this model work for them? What if the company released a developer’s kit for the iPhone, allowing users to build and share their applications? Would this increase the life of the iPhone and cut down on constant expensive updates and releases?
What Apple Have to Say About This? We’d love to know.
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Tags: 3G, 3gs, Apple, Apps, iPhone, iphone jailbreak, Jailbreaking
All falls down to monies, Apple dont want to lose out!!