Why Jailbreaking is now ‘Legal’ in U.S.

Here are some of the reasons why not to  jailbreak iOS.

With newly added exemptions to DMCA act, Electronic Frontier Foundation has made some epic accomplishment in favor of Jailbreakers, Unlockers and Video artists. From now on, Jailbreaking is purely legal in U.S. and no jailbreaker in U.S. needs to bother about any legal ramifications if the hardware owner decides to jailbreak his mobile phone, making it to root access and willing to run unofficial third party apps on phone’s hardware.

This ruling comes as a major setback to Apple, which strongly condemns Jailbreaking of its ‘closed’ products such as iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. In an effort of keeping the overall environment in its firm control, Apple always desires to let users run pre-installed apps or approved apps downloaded/purchased from the App Store. That’s one reason why Apple keeps plugging software exploits unearthed by hackers/jailbreakers and keeps releasing updated iOS versions with software fixes.

But now when ‘Jailbreaking’ has gone legal in U.S., Apple might not discourage ‘Jailbreaking’ the way it used to do it earlier.

This is how Apple will discourage ‘Jailbreaking’ from now on…

“Don’t Jailbreak your iOS device because….”

• It will severely ‘degrade’ your software experience
• It will make your device unstable/error prone
• It will hamper hardware reliability
• It will violate warranty of your iOS device

Still, I reckon, Apple need not worry about this epic judgement as Jailbreaking won’t really shoot up, even after becoming a legal activity in U.S.

Here’s why….

• ‘Jailbreaking‘ isn’t a child’s play. It requires decent programming skills or at least deep understanding of digging the software roots.
• Jailbreaking puts the device at the risk of ‘bricking'(permanent damage), if anything goes wrong while rooting your device.
• ‘Jailbreaking‘ doesn’t offer huge rewards to any iOS device owner. It just enables you to run unauthorized third party apps on your hardware. To most of the iOS loyalists, 225000 approved apps are more than enough.
• So far, only 10% of iOS devices are actually Jailbroken. That’s a pretty small minority which mostly comprises of hackers and geeks.
• Majority of Apple’s cult is absurdly religious, willing to follow every word that Steve Jobs preaches and in this case, Steve Jobs/Apple discourages Jailbreaking and hence there are least chances for the cult to disobey their ‘God'(Steve!)

Rather i see a reverse-psychology happening with Jailbreakers and hackers. It might happen that ‘Jailbreaking’ may go down by itself, post this judgement.

Here’s why…

Jailbreakers/Crackers are defined by doing stuff that’s illegal. Doing illegal stuff actually brings motivation to Crackers as there’s no monetary incentive of doing stuff like that. Now that Jailbreaking is legal, hackers/jailbreakers may rather turn focus on doing other illegal stuff, not ‘legal’ Jailbreaking, which may appear rather ‘boring’ to them.

Hence Apple need not worry about this ruling. It just needs to keep releasing iOS updates with patches to latest exploits, something that Apple has been doing for years now.