Why the FCC making phone jailbreaks legal means nothing…

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) on Monday made the process of jailbreaking, as well as unlocking, your cell phone a legal practice.

It seems like there is some confusion regarding this decision and I feel that I should shine some light onto the matter and why it is a completely meaningless decision.

While jailbreaking has been technically illegal in the United States, no one has ever been prosecuted for jailbreaking their phones or for providing software to allow others to jailbreak their phones.

So even while jailbreaking was illegal, it was never once challenged legally.

The highlighted phone in the middle of this ruling is Apple’s iPhone.

There is good reason for this as the iPhone is the most popular phone on the market right now and jailbreakers have been hacking away at iPhone software since the first iPhone was released in 2007.

However, this ruling does not just involve jailbreaking iPhones, it involves the jailbreaking of any phone on the market.

Another key point of today’s ruling was making the process of unlocking your phone to be used on any network a legal practice as well.

So what do these ruling really mean for the end users?

Nothing.

Simply because jailbreaking and unlocking are now legal does not mean there will be a flurry of hackers firing up their jailbreaking tools and releasing application after application to allow users to unlock their phones.

In addition, today’s ruling does not make it illegal for phone manufacturers to simply release a software update that breaks and jailbreak software that is available for download.

This means that, just as always, a simple bug fix released for you phone will probably unjailbreak your phone and all the end user can do is either not upgrade or upgrade and then wait for the jailbreakers to come out with a new jailbreaking tool.

Also, jailbreaking your phone still voids your phone’s warranty, so don’t jailbreak your phone and expect the manufacturer to fix any problems it may have.

Let it be known that I am in favor of today’s ruling making jailbreaking legal.

I have had my iPhone jailbroken several times for various reasons including the ability to download jailbreak-only apps, customize different aspects of my phone and simply to just play around and explorer the file structure of the iPhone.

I commend the efforts of the jailbreak teams out there, most notably the iPhone Dev Team, as they bust their asses to provide easy to use jailbreak software for end users.

So while this ruling will technically not do much at all, it is a positive step for end users who are interested in jailbreaking their phones.