U.S. Government: You Can Jailbreak Your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad - Legally!

The U.S. government has said that iPhone owners are officially allowed to “jailbreak” their devices for “educational purposes.”
The new rule was one of a number of exemptions to 1998′s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention protections. These exemptions are reviewed and authorized every three years to ensure that work protected by copyright can be used in non-infringing ways.

While the “jailbreaking” exemption is surprising, it’s not the only one of note.
Others include the ability:

• To bypass video game protections in order to investigate or correct security flaws
• For college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break the copy-protect measures on DVDs for embedding clips for educational purposes, criticism or in noncommercial videos
• To bypass the use of external dongles if the dongle no longer works
• For used cellphone owners to unlock phones so that they can be switched to another wireless carrier (this was a renewal of a 2006 exemption)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which filed for three of these exemptions, is understandably ecstatic.
Its statement says in part:

“The first of EFF’s three successful requests clarifies the legality of cell phone ‘jailbreaking’ — software modifications that liberate iPhones and other handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker. More than a million iPhone owners are said to have “jailbroken” their handsets in order to change wireless providers or use applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes ‘App Store,’ and many more have expressed a desire to do so. But the threat of DMCA liability had previously endangered these customers and alternate applications stores.
In its reasoning in favor of EFF’s jailbreaking exemption, the Copyright Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: ‘When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”

While we expect the jailbreaking news to get all of the attention, the ability for amateurs and educators to use short commercial video clips in their noncommercial or educational works is actually a much bigger deal. In essence, this makes the art of the video mashup “legal” and, in theory, should put a stop to many of the DMCA removal requests sent to services like YouTube.