If you're not an US citizen, you've probably never heard about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), designed specifically in order to protect the rights of various digital content. However, the law had some flaws, probably the most important one (which, in fact, came under a lot of criticism over the past few years) involving people's actual usage of the software/hardware equipment they've paid good money for.

But it seems that the Library of Congress (which Copyright Office ) has decided to make some amends to this law, following which customers will have a much greater level of control over the software/hardware they purchase, being even able to modify it in certain specific situations.

There Library of Congress' official release contains two very important paragraphs, which we'll relay as follows. The first one refers to “Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset”, while the second to “computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network”.

So, to put it simple and easy, smartphnone users won't have to fear anything when jailbreaking their phones or running all sorts of software on it, as long as the respective software was developed by themselves or obtained in a legal manner.

However, that's not stopping Apple or any other smartphone manufacturers from implementing some very serious security measures within their phones, in order to counter any cracking attempts. But it does stop them from going after the jailbreak developers, unless they employ the software they've developed for financial gain (which is quite often the case).


We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .  

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