The President Barack Obama administration must enter the mobile-phone-unlocking fray.
Thanks to a whitehouse.gov petition reaching 100,000 signatures Thursday, the administration must respond publicly about a recent decision by copyright regulators making it illegal to unlock mobile phones purchased after January 26.
What’s this all about?
Unlocking enables a phone to operate on a compatible carrier of a consumer’s choosing.
Four months ago, the U.S. Copyright Office ended the practice of granting an unlocking exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA makes it illegal to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access” to copyrighted material, in this case software embedded in phones that controls carrier access.
The petition demanded that the White House “champion a bill that makes unlocking permanently legal” or, in the alternative, require the administration to ask copyright regulators to reverse course.
Under the latest White House policy, the administration will publicly respond, at undisclosed times, to whitehouse.gov petitions reaching 100,000 signatures in a month.
For more background on the topic and DMCA rule making, see this story.
David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.
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White House Must Respond Publicly to Ban on Mobile-Phone Unlocking
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