Unlocking cellphones is now legal in USA

Unlocking cellphones is now legal in USA

The Register of Copyrights in the United States has now made it legal for mobile phone owners to legally unlock their owned devices. They released the latest list of exemptions to 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and it has brought some good news for the mobile users.

They have proposed six new exemptions and the fifth one state: “Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.”

Users can now unlock their purchased phones to use with competing network service providers. Until now, customers had to get a new phone in case they aimed to move from one mobile network to another. The copyright office said that they decided to go ahead with this exemption as they determined that the software which restricts consumers from accessing their phone’s firmware has less to do with actual copyright law and more to do with business models.