I often hear the rant on why its ok to buy walled garden/closed/restrictive devices because you can jailbreak/mod them. What happens when the companies whose TOS/EULA you have agreed to when you purchased the device spend time and money on lobbying/fud to make jail breaking/moding a crime? Still folks continue to support such companies.
"Jay Freeman, the founder of Cydia, the alternative Apple app store for jailbroken iOS devices, said in the last year alone, 54 million unique Apple devices have downloaded his store. Freeman did not testify, but was in the audience of less than two dozen onlookers.
He noted that during the last exemption go-around, Apple staunchly protested, saying authorizing jailbreaking would ruin its business model, which at the time included 1 billion Apple-approved app downloads.
Today, more than 25 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s app store, and its stock is skyrocketing. Apple, which had also claimed jailbreaking would open cell towers to sabotage, was nowhere in sight at today’s hearing."
Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
LOS ANGELES — To jailbreak or not to jailbreak? That was the question on everybody’s mind Thursday as copyright regulators, content creators and digital rights groups battled over whether Americans should have the right to tinker with the devices that they buy.
The U.S. Copyright Office held the hearing Thursday as part of its deliberations over whether it will continue to allow Amer…
