Jailtime For Jailbreaking 281
An anonymous reader writes "Remember how the Librarian of Congress announced that jailbreaking your phone was legal and not a violation of the DMCA? Yeah, well, tell that to Mohamad Majed, who has already spent over a year in jail and has now been pressured into pleading guilty to criminal DMCA violations for jailbreaking phones for use on other carriers."
Well naturally... (Score:0, Insightful)
No ex post facto laws (Score:2, Insightful)
And? The clause about no ex post facto laws swings both ways.
Lawsuit Phishing (Score:1, Insightful)
The new business model in the media/tech industry seems to be 'Lawsuit Phishing' where you sue everybody and hope that a few suckers actually pay you.
Phone companies are evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Beyond the Scope (Score:4, Insightful)
From the link in TFA:
Majed shipped several thousand prepaid wireless phones to co-conspirators in Michigan and Hong Kong.
Majed didn't go to jail for jailbreaking his iPhone, or even a handful of them for friends. The jailbreaking exemption (http://www.copyright.gov/1201/) states that the exemption exists for the owner of the device in order for the owner to use an alternate cellular network. This guy was essentially running a business buying heavily subsidized Tracfones, unlocking them, and selling them by the thousands. One could argue that between the purchase and the resale that he was the owner of the device and thus was covered, but let's keep perspective - Majed wasn't convicted for rooting his Droid, he was running a business on a technicality, and a stretched one at that.
Re:Really bad summary (Score:3, Insightful)
[citation needed]
Primitive heathens (Score:2, Insightful)
Putting people in the stockade for stealing a loaf of bread... No not even... for not renting the baker's knife to cut his own bread...
Re:Lawsuit Phishing (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that what he was doing does not fall under the exemption. The exemption was that you can jailbreak YOUR OWN phone. This is the same reason why it's legal to break CSS encyption on DVD to use copyrighted clips in fair use works but it is not legal for someone to run a business where by they are stripping CSS off of ripped DVDs and then selling those unencrypted discs.
Both Techdirt and the submitter seem to have reading comprehension problems.
Illegal uless used? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it illegal to jailbreak a phone if you haven't used it? Illegal to jailbreak more than one phone? Illegal to sell a phone after you jailbreak it? Illegal only if two or more of the above?
I think you have a case of the ole "illegal to profit from someone else's work" mindset.
Re:No ex post facto laws (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>this idiot pleaded guilty, so you can't really blame anyone but him.
The Supreme Court has ruled that your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent is still a protected right, if it can be demonstrated that the person was never informed of that right. They also stated that oftentimes completely-innocent people will plead guilty to a crime they never committed, so that alone is not enough evidence to convict.
Bottom Line:
Keep your mouth shut. I've had people tell me, "Oh well if you were innocent why wouldn't you cooperate with the police and let them see inside your trunk, or home?" Answer: Because innocent people have been sent to prison. Better to not volunteer anything.
Re:No ex post facto laws (Score:4, Insightful)
Nullification is what happens when SCOTUS rules a law to be unconstitutional. Unless of course I've missed the cases where SCOTUS rules something to be unconstitutional and the law stays legally binding. What you're arguing is semantics as any law that's ruled to be unconstitutional is unconstitutional unless SCOTUS issues a new precedent or test that indicates otherwise.
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Re:Well naturally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No ex post facto laws (Score:4, Insightful)
You might notice that the wording was slightly changed in the most recent version of the exclusion, it now applies to "used" phones, and must be done by "the owner," which changes the rules, and makes what he was doing illegal now. The government clearly recognized that the exclusion covered his actions, and consequently changed it.
To Faylone: making a profit isn't illegal.
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Re:No ex post facto laws (Score:4, Insightful)