Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday in the U.S.

From some years ago, in pre-smart phone days, stories from Europe would be somewhat transfixing.

'When I became unhappy with my current provider / traveled to another country / didn't want a monthly plan and fixed fee, I simply bought a different SIM and popped it in.'

You mean, you changed your cell service by changing the 'memory card'? You didn't have to pay $40/month (or equivalent) for 90 minutes of phone calls? You're not locked into a 2 year contract? You don't get caught and screwed over with roaming fees (remember those)? (Different SIM card for the different country.) THEY DON'T $0.10, $0.20, WHATEVER PER TEXT MESSAGE?

I'm probably forgetting many of the other "astonishing" differences.

All you needed to do was have an "average" U.S. person talk for 2 minutes with an "average" European about cell phone use, and the American was ready for a change.

P.S. I realize this is sarcastic, but I suppose this change will end up getting someone charged with a felony for "hacking", at the DOJ's or other law enforcement organization's convenience.

Yes, but if you foresee that you would need to travel, couldn't you just buy an unlocked phone? (I normally just buy an entirely different phone, a cheap Nokia brick handset, for travel use). This law doesn't prevent people from using unlocked phones, it prevents people from taking advantage of the carrier subsidy.

Carriers agreed to give you a shiny new smartphone for a massively subsidized prize in return for you being locked to their network.

It seems rather exploitative to take advantage of this quid pro quo by breaking free from that agreement. All this law seems to do is to prevent people from taking without giving.

> "I want to go to Europe"

> You can't do that next week. Well, you can, but you won't be able to use your phone there without paying ridiculous roaming and data charges.

Would it be legal for me to unlock the phone once I land in Europe? Would it also be legal for me to return to the U.S. with said phone that I unlocked over seas?

Well, MOST of the world has cheap (below $10 USD) prepaid plans like europe, I think japan is an exception where "cheap" calls using prepaid sim cards is very difficult (nearly impossible) to get because the three most popular providers docomo, au, Softbank all have very steep prices for just calls. The situation is even worse for prepaid data plans (~$25/mb using Softbank, insane. Texts were also $2.50/text, so that's not an option either). Their reasoning is to prevent criminals from buying burners. And if your phone is locked then you would have no choice but to rent their phones for about $50/week or $200/month, to put it into a monthly contract perspective.

There are a few exceptions such as buying from other networks besides the big three but those networks don't work in non-metropolitan areas (i.e. outside of tokyo, kyoto, or most major cities), and that's when you might need your phone the most, especially if you can't speak Japanese.

The loopholes: using wifi to gvoice call internationally at $0.11/min in Japan, or payphones, because receiving calls is free. I digress, but to explain the situation, I found a store (Mobal) at narita int'l airport that gave free SIM cards where you "pay as you go" at around $2.50/min (the other stores charge ~$1.50/min but you needed to pay $25 flat fee and then a rate of $1.50/min), but I also bought a portable wifi router so that I could make internet calls through gvoice for $0.11/min (or free calls back home in the U.S.) and you can avoid paying them as long as you can make wifi calls (free wifi isn't as common in japan as everyone thinks).

Not sure that's a great example either- a new SIM gives you a new (local) phone number.

If I'm only overseas for a week (or other short period), and especially if it's for business, it's a whole lot more convenient for me to pay exorbitant roaming fees and still get phone service to my normal number.

Yes, it's cheaper to buy a new sim, and locals can call you a little easier, but in some cases it's not worth it.

The problem that the OP states is that nowadays there doesn't seem to be a lot of real-world practical examples where one would want or need to unlock their phone....

You probably can't use your phone for travel if you have Sprint or Verizon anyway, since they don't use the same cellular standards as most of the world. And if you have a typical "tri-band" phone from another carrier you may be unable to use 3G data. It is unfortunately complicated in ways it does not need to be. And don't even get me started on the wonders of APNs when travelling...many customer service folks don't know how to set up data on foreign phones anyway. It should all be automatic.

Exactly why I got my Dinc2 on VZW unlocked. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Ecuador (beautiful country, btw) and I bought a Claro SIM in a store on the street and was able to call and text home (though Skype was cheaper when in the hotels, being able to call around the country and home if need-be was what I wanted).

Ditto in India over Christmas. I bought a Vodafone card and was able to call home, or would have if my phone wasn't being stupid (yay! for unstable roms!)

Thank you for the clearest explanation so far - I never knew what unlocking was (and never cared so far).

Now I kind of care. But I would oppose making it illegal.

Is it illegal to unlock your phone in France?

Does this actually work, though? I was under the impression that most phones sold in the US have incompatible GSM frequencies to those sold in Europe.

Yeah, I have switched out SIM cards on my travels.

When I Had a locked phone, I would keep it on Airplane mode for the duration of my trip.

iPhone 5 on Verizon is not locked and you can do this if you desire. I'm not sure about other phones.

Except that unlocking the phone doesn't free anyone from fulfilling their side of the original contract. So network interests in recapturing their subsidies don't even enter into it.

If I buy an iPhone 5 from ATT and unlock it, even if I pay for a Straight Talk SIM and use that from time to time, I'm still on the hook to pay AT&T whatever monthly fee the contract obligates me to pay.

The only reason AT&T would want me to not unlock my phone, is to ensure they have a captive market for further services that are not part of the contract. Be they usage overages, international roaming, etc.

They'd like my $70/mo for a base smartphone package (with an absurd early termination fee to boot) and to not have to compete for any additional or international service I may need.

Now you can certainly argue that that's a consideration people are willingly agreeing to when they agree to buy subsidized phones on contract. But the argument is that it's a consideration that ought to be explicitly spelled out in the contract terms, rather than enforced by an end-run through copyright law that most people don't know about and have no reason to believe holds any bearing over how they use a device they're paying for.

But you do fully own the phone, even if you're on a contract. It's not like a mortgage or a car loan; the phone company doesn't have a lien on your phone. The penalty for breaking the contract isn't to give the phone back--it's to pay a termination fee.

You do have a point, but it's not like unlocking the phone gets you out of paying your monthly fees. Hell, they should encourage it because they'd still get your subscription fee and you might not even use their service!

I don' think that's what the article is about. If you break the contract you'll have to pay a terminal fee anyway.

I know that here in Canada, even if you buy an iPhone full price from anyone but Apple, it is locked to that vendor. Which seems ludicrous to me.

As stated out by another user this not an accurate metaphor. With yours Shell loses out on potential revenue if you go to another gas station. To buy a subsided phone it is in contract that you must stay with that said company for a period of time. If you break that contract you have to pay full price for that phone. Unlocking a phone does not in anyway alleviate you from your obligation to abide by that contract and pay your bill. Unlocked or not unlocked you still have to pay.

Imagine not being able to buy cheap gas because some economist got it in his head that people were more easily fooled by cheap cars subsidized by marked up gas with an implicit 20%+ interest rate so that you had to buy the gas and car that way even if you were perfectly willing to pay up-front for the car rather than the implicit financing fee via marked-up gas.

There, that's the analogy we should be using.

The difference is, if I pay full price for an unlocked handset, I still pay the same monthly bill as someone who doesn't. Explain that one.

You could also siphon your heating oil into your diesel car, with the problem that you are not paying for your share of road use.

It also becomes an interesting conundrum with electric cars. In one sense their externalities in terms of environmental impact and geopolitical costs are generally much lower than conventional cars, but they are not paying for their use of public roads.

Of course that also means that if you limit your consideration to the road only, someone driving a lightweight Ferrari that gets 13MPG is really helping out with the cost of roads, even if they are also needlessly contributing a lot of carbon to the atmosphere.

Maybe fido has different policies, but typically if your phone has the right radios, your carrier will let you "roam", and they charge you for the privilege. This means you should get service in the states, it just costs a lot of money.

Until you realize that the LoC is basically deciding these things by executive fiat. Seriously, what has changed in the last few years that suddenly makes phone unlocking a threat to digital security when before it was just fine?

Nothing has changed except who's getting the money.

>> "Ironic how Capitalism seems to function much better in other countries, even though the U.S. made Capitalism what it is today."

Plus 1000. In waaay to many cases, the government merely helps corporations deliver less value while extorting more money out of us for that lower value.

Consider cable monopolies, internet service monopolies, and many other examples.

In Capitalism, a business's proceeds should be based on its ability to deliver more value than other competitors ... not on its ability to get the government to help it strong-arm money out of people's pockets.

That's because too many in the US believe that free markets are defined by the lack of regulation rather than by the quality of regulation.

What's ironic is the companies and individuals that hide behind the excuse of capitalism for most of their ethically questionable activities are the same people who actively lobby to destroy free markets thus further leveraging their control over consumers.

Sometimes I wonder if Americans really live in a democratic and capitalist society, because sometimes it feels more like a dictatorship ran by the "megacorps" who crush any competition they can through excessive lobbying and abusing the various intellectual property mechanisms.

What's even more ironic is the "evil" communist nation of China has more of a free market due to their blatant disregard of intellectual property. Anyone can make any bit of hardware they want, sell it anywhere they want and shop keepers can charge whatever price they want.

I'm not saying that China's lack of control is is a good thing necessarily, China are too far in the opposite direction in my opinion. But I just love the perverse logic that the "land of the free" and the pioneers of capitalism is one of the most controlled and anti-consumer markets in the world.

The world is truly topsy-turvy.

The Australia remark is utter bullshit. From Wikipedia:

> In Australia, carriers can choose whether to SIM/Network Lock handsets or not and usually tend to only SIM/Network lock prepaid handsets. There does not appear to be any regulation or law on SIM locking in Australia.

Most phones can be unlocked for free by the carrier after a few years, but if you want it unlocked upfront (usually before passing n years or sometimes $k of credit in the case of prepaid phones), you'll have to pay the carrier.

These days, wouldn't this be more the domain of the "copyright czar" (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/intellectualproperty), Victoria Espinel?

Why would hardcore libertarians defend laws like these? It's an obvious market restriction.

> At the very least, AT&T should be able to sue you for the breach of contract and get their $350 back.

That's exactly what they do, except that a lawsuit isn't necessary. It's already part of the contract. Specifically, AT&T charges $350 - ($10 * <number of months used>).

And, I agree, that's actually quite fair.

http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/articles-resources/early-t...

Edit: Added link to AT&T termination fees

If you're unlocking your subsidized phone and moving to another carrier, you either have to keep paying your original contract or pay the early termination fee, both of which balance out the subsidy. If you're off-contract or have already completed your contract term, you've already bought the phone outright. As far as I am aware, there is literally no point of time where you can unlock your phone and leave your carrier high and dry.

The quid pro quo was to sign a service contract. No part of that transaction made the phone any less mine, or gave them any rights to my hardware.

I have no problem with lockin to specific app stores, consoles that only run approved games etc. A company can sell what they like; it's their product

... but ... once purchased the owner should be free to do what they like with it. Jailbreak, hack, whatever. It's their physical device to do with what they like. Sure, this may not suit some business models (like consoles sold at a loss) but too bad. Those companies are free to make hacking/jailbreaking said device as dificult as they like, but if someone can bypass that then good. I don't believe the goventment should be involved at all, on either side

It is a lost fight. The moment you hear competent developers and tech savvy people telling you that the locked bootloaders and the ability of apple or microsoft to be total moral arbiters is "fine and good for the users", some of them people that have benefited greatly from the openness of the PC and WWW ... its is sad.

No, you completely paid for it. You get a discount on the phone when you agree to contractual obligations. You own the phone no matter what, irrelevant to the performance of your contractual obligations.

You're partially correct in that you would still be "paying" for the phone through your contract, but once you get the phone, you own it, but because most contracts state that if you were to cancel your contract before its completion, you would have to pay a cancellation fee, most of which would be the "subsidy" portion for your phone.

This is to prevent people from getting iphone 5s for free and then running off with them and selling them on craigslist or china for $1000 (which you'd probably still make money even if you paid the $600 or $700 cancellation fee)

This isn't exactly accurate; "... are able to pass regulations with criminal penalties without passing a law through Congress."

The DMCA was passed by congress and provides the criminal penalties. It's up to the agencies to work out the exact details of what falls under those penalties, within congress' wording. The larger problem is congress passing extremely broad laws.

Congress can't possibly legislate out every detail of every law (imagine holding hearings to decide on what species of tree in some national forest can be logged or on the details of the airport airspace restrictions around Des Moines Iowa), so they leave it to agencies. This isn't anything new.

That's not to say that there are no oversight issues though...

The regulatory agencies are largely controlled by the executive branch, and the increase in their power in part of a larger, seemingly irreversible towards the president being a sort of elected king.

There are many reasons for this, but the growing staleness and corruption of congress is a major one. That, in turn, is caused by a historical low in congressional turnover (with a multitude of causes, including Gerrymandering, Power determined by seniority, etc)

Term limits, preferably on consecutive terms rather than absolute ones, would help. And it's considerably more likely to happen than, say, switching our voting system to proportional representation.

Congress is supposed to be the people's chamber, in fact, the most important and powerful branch of government. Without a strong one, the Republic, in the form it was intended, will fail.

Yes, regulatory agencies making laws is a hard call. The agencies are at least more specialist than Congress and don't have nearly the quid pro quo problems that election funding entails.

However, I'm sure a lot of them come from industry, which biases them to the establishment.

The nice thing is that they can easily be changed through public outcry unlike stupid laws passed through Congress.

It's a basic principle of administrative law that administrative regulations can only be adopted with legislative authority, which in this case was granted by a statute Congress passed. It should be possible to look up the second step taken on this issue as an administrative regulation, which was a public notice and comment period. I have read the official notices and public comments for other administrative regulations on other topics, and generally regulators get plenty of commentary from the public (with "public" of course including interest groups, but also private citizens) whenever a new regulation is in the notice and commment period. "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The Common Law (1881), p. 1.

The Librarian of Congress was responsible for the exemption that exempted jailbreaking in the first place, and then decided not to renew it. The public is actually petitioned for what they think should be exempted and their argument for or against. As to whether it's truly illegal or not is now up to the courts.

It's only insane if you think that every new law makes something illegal. A law can do just about anything: clarify or update the language of existing laws, create or amend a budget, add or revoke a subsidy for a product or economic activity, be a statement of purpose, or allocate funds for infrastructure projects. In other words, just claiming that "40,000" laws is insane doesn't really mean much. Governments work by way of laws, so this metric simply tells me that these governments are active. To determine whether or not their activity is insane, one must investigate the types of laws being passed.

Likely yes. China wants in here and what better way than to offer cheaper phones that you can use with any carrier? To fend off that competition, the big name brands will have to do it first. I keep asking how much of a carrier-free phone's "price" is actually too fat a margin built in to soak carriers, who can seemingly afford to pay up.

I guess for the same reason that people buy cars on credit.

Here in the UK there are millions of students and people of limited means who own iphone5s but probably wouldn't have had the spare £550 in their bank account at a discreet point in time to buy one straight up.

T-Mobile is already dropping subsidized phones. See http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/07/us-tmobileusa-ipho...

For a long time they weren't just provided by the phone company, they were owned by the phone company. The theory (at least as presented to the public) was you couldn't let ordinary people hook anything they wanted to the phone lines -- think of the potential for chaos!

Bell Systems phones ("telephonic instruments") were owned by the Bell System, not by you.

You were prohibited from modifying it in any way. That included moving the phone from room to room or attaching any kind of accessory to the phone.

It isn't just him (and arguably it isn't him at all: its people he has working under him); I got a chance to meet some of the people on the panel when they were at the hearings in LA, and they actually seemed quite "with it" (although certainly not "technology expert", but that's asking a lot).

It's impossible to say, even THINK that people would stop voting as a form of silent protest. With all the propagandist lies being shoved down our throats --

"Rock the vote!" "Your vote counts!" "If you don't vote, you will be doing your country a disservice! Blahbedyblahbedyblah"

And all this propaganda is more bipartisan lies. The root cause of this entire problem is that people think they can only decide between the lesser of two evils because of naivety or misguidedness and delusion. The bipartisan system is corrupt. Third parties, particularly the Libertarian and Green parties, embody the true meaning of Americanism and are perhaps the only way to get this hellhole of a country back on track. The only way to do that is to raise awareness of the lies and evil in our current administration and other administrations of the past, and to increase awareness of a third, even fourth choice. It is difficult, however, with the entertainment industry shamelessly supporting big government and limited rights. The RIAA, anyone?

USA is already rock bottom in voting turnout. See how well it works. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/soc_glance-2011-en/08/04/...

Carriers have an escape clause fee in their contracts.

If you cancel your contract, you get hit with the fee.

I don't think phones should be locked to any carrier. Instead change the contract rules. If you cancel after the cooling off period and in the first 30 days you pay (blah), and every month there after it's (blah) - (something)*number of Months. Only if the phone was subsidized by the contract, of course.

I say this as someone who needs to be able to change out sims when I travel.

There is further discussion about this started from a comment I made elsewhere on this article; the replies seem to clarify that only specific laws (including, apparently, this cigar issue you bring up, looking into it; that is apparently new as of 2004) have extra-territorial application.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5111405

I don't believe the OP was actually comparing a 2-year contract to getting killed in a gas chamber. But rather comparing how easy it is for many people to just look away and not care about things that happen to others since it is not happening to them... only to find that one day it DOES happen to them and then they're screwed. This happens on many levels less than genocide. Getting involved should not be reserved for only combating genocide.

It's a bit shocking that people do not realize the context in which this quote was born.

For anyone who makes such misguided comparisons, I urge you seek out someone who actually lived through Nazi rule or in the Soviet Union and find out what they think of your ideas.

While I appreciate you're point, I'm thinking about this in the context of the Schwartz case and others. There is value to pointing to the slippery slope and fighting against it. I don't accept the premise of the Godwin's Law argument but respect that you do. I'd also point out that the quote pre-dates the Nazis by half a century so I didn't really go there

EDIT: You're right I literally misred his bio and had thought he died the year he was born :) Makes more sense, I admit :)

With all due respect, even if the rhetoric is a bit hyperbolic, redwood's point is still valid. Winning major legislative and court victories against telecom, for example, makes no difference if consumers are willing (or forced) to negotiate their way into even worse positions than before as technological and market forces render cable/broadband and wireless providers the true behemoths of the modern market.

This a thousand times. It seems geeks get their panties in a bunch and start spouting off nonsense at the drop of a hat around here lately. I don't imagine many are engineers or they would use more logic.

Not true. We also have contract subsidized phones, and you can still unlock and use your phone however you want, you still have the contract to fulfill, or you can pay the ETF and be done with it.

The EU has been good for mobile phone pricing.

£12.50 a month for unlimited data (and enough minutes and texts), oh yeah.

My point is that without government regulation cartels wouldn't arise in the first place. Cartels are vulnerable to competition from outside. No industry has a high enough barrier of entry these days, since many huge corporations shoot all over the place for new business opportunities.

>ripping your own DVDs is illegal //

That's not true in the USA is it - I understood that Fair Use terms meant that you could rip your own DVDs for backup, format shifting and such personal activities.

Perhaps the person using the scare quotes considers that perfectly moral activities that are classified in statute as being illegal are overridden by the demos' agreed morality of the actions. Does anyone find making/using a backup - even if it's format shifted, even if you torrent the backup - to be immoral given you paid your share of the copyright license already?

> it really is illegal, even if you think it shouldn't be

Is there anyone besides the LoC and the DVD lobby that think it should be illegal?

I've no doubt that the majority of the computer owning public are guilty of this "crime." We only have to wait another 20 years before DVD media starts to fail and maybe we'll see this "decriminalized."

So, some context: Xuzz (whom I work with) possibly brings this up as I often make such an argument for the jailbreaking exemption in reverse. Specifically, that people who say it is "now legal" under an exemption are incorrect, as it might still be the case that there are other laws that apply; it just means that this one law now doesn't.

Additionally, I tend to make the argument that we didn't consider it to be "illegal" in the first place, but with jailbreaking the situation is somewhat different: the people opposing the exemptions actually cite as one of their reasons "you don't need an explicit exemption as you are covered by the blanket interoperability clause already".

With regards to unlocking, I have not read all of the relevant history (I have generally avoided working on the unlocking tools for various reasons; if nothing else, I simply haven't personally needed them); the DMCA, though, is mostly supposed to apply to cases of clear copyright infringement, which this is not; it isn't quite "interoperability", though, either.

In particular, there was a case I was interested in, with General Electric as the defendant (yay! ;P), which was hinging on the argument of whether the DMCA could apply to cases unrelated to copyright infringement (GE, by way of a company it acquired, apparently was doing unauthorized field service on a UPS made by a company that required a hardware security dongle to access the software it was running).

The Harvard Journal of Law & Technology publishes the JOLT Digest, where they summarize various cases. This case was summarized there.

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/software/mge-ups-systems-...

The good news:

> The Fifth Circuit held that the DMCA’s provisions apply to protections designed to prevent infringement of copyrighted material and not protection from mere access to that material.

> In so holding, the court limits the DMCA to those cases where a defendant circumvents a protection that is designed to prevent infringement of copyrighted material.

The bad news:

> Barry Sookman provides an overview of the case and an analysis of the court’s ruling. Info/Law has a critical discussion of the DMCA in light of this case’s holding.

> As pointed out by Barry Sookman, such a limitation is inconsistent with prior circuit court decisions and fails “to consider [] legislative history.”

(I had actually forgotten about this case, and thereby had never actually seen the final court opinion. I guess I now have some reading to do this week ;P.)

Without corporations wanting this to happen in the first place, this specific example of corruption doesn't happen. Let's not forget the party to whom this benefits the most.

> The sooner people understand this, things like these won't happen.

Something tells me that even widespread awareness wouldn't change things one bit.

Exactly, for someone like me who doesn't make international trips, the only benefit is not "being in a contract" which gains me practically nothing other than being able to leave on a whim. But to whom would I switch really?

Unlocked phones are a big deal to people in Europe, people who travel internationally a lot and people who just want to have an unlocked phone.

That said, when my contract goes up, I will be getting AT&T to unlock my phone because it makes it easier to sell should I desire.

Good point. This has certainly complicated my thinking.

To add on, you're also effed if you want to buy used phones. They're locked, and since you were never a customer, they won't unlock them for you. Even if you were to "become" a customer for a month with no contract, they still wouldn't unlock them for you, I think you have to be a "customer in good standing" for three months or so according to most providers' policy? That's also only for the carriers who have policies that allow their agents to unlock.

Myself, yesterday I paid a person in India ~$2.00 to unlock an iPhone so I could use the gift on another service. People on Craigslist or local GSM repair shops are less lucky, I've seen demands of 40-100 bucks for the same privilege.

Private industry isn't elected.