Do You Own Your iPhone?

A new front has opened up in the fight over digital rights management (DRM), and sadly we see Apple leading the fray against the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). At issue is the rights of iPhone users to install legal but unauthorized software on their devices.

Every three years, the US Copyright Office considers exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits any circumvention of DRM. The EFF asked for three, the first of which was:

an exemption for computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute lawfully obtained software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications with computer programs on the telephone handset.

This would sound innocent enough, but Apple has gone to great lengths to ensure that users of its iPhone can only install applications approved by the company, in no small part because it takes a percentage of every sale.

In my mind the question boils down to: who really owns your iPhone? And it seems that the answer is (or should be) pretty clear. But because this is obstensibly a copyright issue, the legal question at hand is whether the Copyright Office will permit "creation of unauthorized derivative versions of Apple's copyrighted bootloader and iPhone operating system software".

The EFF has a set up a website for its supporters, which you can find here: http://www.freeyourphone.org