Number unavailable – is locking phones lawful or anticompetitive?
Have you bought a locked mobile/cellular telephone? Are you thinking about doing do? If so, then you will be interested in an article in the New York Times during the week, entitled Locked vs. Unlocked: Opening Up Choice (also here). One element of it caught my eye in particular:
…In the United States … some carriers — and in the case of the iPhone, a phone maker — say that unlocking the phone may violate the company warranty and thus the company will not repair or replace it if something goes awry. Some imply that it is not legal to unlock a phone, but the legal issues are murky at best. A subsection [ie, section 1201] of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 could be interpreted as saying that anyone who unlocks a phone for someone else or tells others how to do it might face legal action.
Some legal scholars, like Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School and an authority on digital copyright law, have argued that interpreting the act that way has little to do with protecting copyrights, and more to do with limiting competition. The Librarian of Congress, the office that determines what things are covered under the copyright act, exempts the unlocking of mobile phones from the law.
