Electronic Frontier Foundation Petitioning To Keep Rooting And Jailbreaking Phones and Tablets Legal

In 2010 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed to help stem the ever present problem of copyrighting media in the digital age. The Electronic Frontier Foundation worked hard though to get a few exemptions to this bill, namely protecting remix videos from being taken down and phones being jailbroken; or rooted. Now, these exemptions are up for renewal this year and not only is the EFF asking for help renewing the two exemptions they have now, they want to expand the exemptions to cover rooting tablets and jailbreaking video game consoles as well.

This is quite a big deal, because if these exemptions do not get renewed it would technically be illegal to root your phone allowing any company who wishes to come after you in court. The biggest case of this would be Sony taking legal action against George Hotz, a man who figured out how to jailbreak the Playstation 3 and put it on the internet. The EFF has a full page dedicated to the rooting exemptions needed along with a petition to sign and a place to send comments directly to the U.S. Copyright Office. There are somewhere near 5,000 signatures already, let’s add our names to make sure we can keep hacking our phones as much as we want.

Via:  EFF Website | Petition