Analysis

Posted on 5 Mar 2009 at 10:53

 

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Apple wants to stop iPhone 'jailbreaking', but is it really acceptable to use a law that's supposed to protect copyright to achieve that business objective?

That Apple is invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to attempt to prevent iPhone owners 'jailbreaking' their phones is no surprise. Equally unsurprising is the news that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is trying to block it.

The EFF doesn't like the DMCA, and with good reason. It's a nasty piece of legislation that criminalises individuals who, for example, break the encryption on a DVD they've bought to make a backup copy. Under the DMCA, it's not the copying for personal use that's illegal, it's the breaking of the encryption. Fair use is a basic principle of US copyright law, but manufacturers effectively outlaw it by encrypting DVDs and other content.

Apple claims that anyone who runs software designed to jailbreak an iPhone is in breach of copyright and therefore of the DMCA. It may eventually be shown to be right in a court of law, but as an exercise in futility, it's right up there with the RIAA suing teenagers for hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading MP3s in their bedrooms. And it deserves to be every bit as much of a PR disaster as that was.

Apple has taken the decision that the iPhone will only run on one network in each country in which it's sold and that it will only run applications that Apple has sanctioned and made available for download on its App Store. The company claims that there are a number of reasons for this, from security of the phone network, to reliability of the legitimate iPhone software, to prevention of piracy.

The underlying reason - the real reason - is that Apple has taken a business decision that it isn't going to open up the iPhone to allow anyone to develop whatever they like for it. The company is, of course, perfectly entitled to do that. And everyone who buys an iPhone does so in the knowledge that the only software they can legitimately run on it is that sanctioned by Apple.

Operating like this benefits Apple in a number of ways. It can take a cut of every application sold, it can control competition for its own applications, and it can ensure that the applications it deems objectionable can't be run on the iPhone. That, too, is fine, as long as everyone knows where they stand. The problem is that Apple is attempting to use legislation designed to protect copyright in order to implement a business decision.

If there's any doubt that Apple's stance is designed to further its own aims rather than prevent the law being broken, you need only look at some of those standing behind the DMCA in its campaign. It would be easy to dismiss Skype and Mozilla's support for the EFF because they clearly have a vested commercial interest. But it's that vested interest that proves the point. eBay, which owns Skype, and Mozilla would love to have versions of Skype and Firefox running on the iPhone. That they haven't isn't down to a lack of technical expertise on their part, and if their interest in the EFF campaign is vested, it surely means that they have apps ready to go that would run on a jailbroken iPhone. And if they'd run on a jailbroken iPhone, they'll run on an unbroken one, except for one obstacle: Apple.

If Apple is policing iPhone apps for security and safety reasons, why block Skype and Firefox? And why not help Adobe with an iPhone version of Flash? If it's concerned about the amount of 3G network bandwidth used by certain applications and the damage that could do to its partners' profit margins, why allow CBS to stream TV programmes to iPhone users in the US?