Plutonic Panda
03-04-2014, 06:02 PM
This would be nice
You know that when you “buy” a mobile phone, you don’t actually have full access to it. Most phones are locked to the carrier you bought them from. But buying a phone may soon look more like actually owning a phone, thanks to a bill to legalize phone unlocking that passed the House last week and faces decent odds in the Senate.
Requiring an act of Congress to use things you’ve paid for as if they are actually your property is maddening. It’s also tech policy as usual. What’s less usual is seeing forward momentum in this area.
While the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) is a flawed solution, it still represents one of the few times when Congress has not just refrained from passing an awful law but moved to fix an older bad law.
The bad law in question is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which when it passed in 1998 made it a crime to circumvent “a technological measure that effectively controls access” to a copyrighted work. Bizarrely, our mobile phones were caught up in that sweep.
Stretching the law
So do wireless carriers lock the SIM card slots of phones to protect software copyrights? Not really. They do it to make it harder for you to switch to another carrier (even though they already have early-termination fees to thwart your defection). But the wonderfully elastic DMCA was easily stretched to cover this situation.
The 105th Congress wasn’t completely oblivious about the blank check it gave to Big Copyright with that law, and so the DMCA included a provision that lets the librarian of Congress, on the advice of the register of copyrights, grant temporary exemptions to the anti-circumvention clause. That’s exactly what Librarian James H. Billington did in 2006 when he allowed phone unlocking.
Alas, in subsequent exemption rulings he narrowed that right before extinguishing it almost completely in 2012, on the grounds that “consumers now have access to a variety of unlocked phones.” As in, why whine about not being able to unlock your paid-for iPhone when you can buy a new, unlocked iPhone for $450 and up?
At that point, unlocking-service entrepreneur Sina Khanifar and Republican policy wonk Derek Khanna got righteously mad and filed a petition at the White House’s site.
Theirs easily crossed the required 100,000-signature threshold and drew a more serious response than, say, an earlier request that the U.S. build a Death Star. Wrote senior adviser R. David Edelman: “The White House agrees with the 114,000+ of you who believe that consumers should be able to unlock their cell phones without risking criminal or other penalties.”
That got a few policy wheels turning a little faster. By the end of last year, some public nagging by new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler led to the major carriers pledging to unlock the phone of any out-of-contract subscriber on request — and even to notify them when they’d (ahem) unlocked that option.
That didn’t make the Unlocking Consumer Choice bill irrelevant — the industry promise covers only current and former subscribers, not recipients of their old phones. And it doesn’t let you ask somebody else to unlock the phone.
- Read more here: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/progress-soon-you-may-actually-be-able-to-unlock-your-78480275871.html
You know that when you “buy” a mobile phone, you don’t actually have full access to it. Most phones are locked to the carrier you bought them from. But buying a phone may soon look more like actually owning a phone, thanks to a bill to legalize phone unlocking that passed the House last week and faces decent odds in the Senate.
Requiring an act of Congress to use things you’ve paid for as if they are actually your property is maddening. It’s also tech policy as usual. What’s less usual is seeing forward momentum in this area.
While the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) is a flawed solution, it still represents one of the few times when Congress has not just refrained from passing an awful law but moved to fix an older bad law.
The bad law in question is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which when it passed in 1998 made it a crime to circumvent “a technological measure that effectively controls access” to a copyrighted work. Bizarrely, our mobile phones were caught up in that sweep.
Stretching the law
So do wireless carriers lock the SIM card slots of phones to protect software copyrights? Not really. They do it to make it harder for you to switch to another carrier (even though they already have early-termination fees to thwart your defection). But the wonderfully elastic DMCA was easily stretched to cover this situation.
The 105th Congress wasn’t completely oblivious about the blank check it gave to Big Copyright with that law, and so the DMCA included a provision that lets the librarian of Congress, on the advice of the register of copyrights, grant temporary exemptions to the anti-circumvention clause. That’s exactly what Librarian James H. Billington did in 2006 when he allowed phone unlocking.
Alas, in subsequent exemption rulings he narrowed that right before extinguishing it almost completely in 2012, on the grounds that “consumers now have access to a variety of unlocked phones.” As in, why whine about not being able to unlock your paid-for iPhone when you can buy a new, unlocked iPhone for $450 and up?
At that point, unlocking-service entrepreneur Sina Khanifar and Republican policy wonk Derek Khanna got righteously mad and filed a petition at the White House’s site.
Theirs easily crossed the required 100,000-signature threshold and drew a more serious response than, say, an earlier request that the U.S. build a Death Star. Wrote senior adviser R. David Edelman: “The White House agrees with the 114,000+ of you who believe that consumers should be able to unlock their cell phones without risking criminal or other penalties.”
That got a few policy wheels turning a little faster. By the end of last year, some public nagging by new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler led to the major carriers pledging to unlock the phone of any out-of-contract subscriber on request — and even to notify them when they’d (ahem) unlocked that option.
That didn’t make the Unlocking Consumer Choice bill irrelevant — the industry promise covers only current and former subscribers, not recipients of their old phones. And it doesn’t let you ask somebody else to unlock the phone.
- Read more here: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/progress-soon-you-may-actually-be-able-to-unlock-your-78480275871.html