Skype and Mozilla protest Apple’s anti-jailbreaking claim
Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be relaxed
Apple made a legal move to suggest that jailbreaking your iPhone can be considered illegal recently, which has sparked a significant outcry from open source activists and, now, from within the industry itself.
Both Skype and Mozilla have filed comments with the US Copyrights Office supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s insistence that rules on jailbreaking an iPhone need to be relaxed.
It’s Apple’s assertion that jailbreaking the device amounts to “copyright infringement, potential damage to the device and other potential harmful physical effects, adverse effects on the functioning of the device, and breach of contract”.
Despite a forced relaxation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) essentially opening up the iPhone platform to third party developers such as Skype and Mozilla, the latter insists it has no interest in developing Firefox or other products for Apple’s handsets.
Instead, its claims are rather more idealistic in nature. Mozilla’s VP Harvey Anderson says, "Mozilla is dedicated to ensuring that the internet is a public resource that remains open and accessible to all." – a claim that’s easy to believe considering the free products, such as Firefox and Thunderbird, that Mozilla has made available to millions of internet users.
He continues to say that manufacturer locked and controlled handsets create a situation where “[The internet], an open and public resource, is artificially constrained and unnecessarily defined by the hardware vendor," leading to “a chilling effect on users and on innovation.”
Via The Register.
