It looks as though Apple is trying to stop the Jailbreak or “Jailbreaking” made popular by the iPhone Dev Team. The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently publish a blog stating that Apple has comments filed with the US Copyright Office stating that the Jailbreak/Jailbreaking process and applications is a copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, and therefore illegal.

Jailbreaking an iPhone constitutes copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, says Apple in comments filed with the Copyright Office as part of the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking. This marks the first formal public statement by Apple about its legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking.

Apple’s iPhone, now the best-selling cellular phone in the U.S., has been designed with restrictions that prevent owners from running applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes App Store. “Jailbreaking” is the term used for removing these restrictions, thereby liberating your phone from Apple’s software “jail.” Estimates put the number of iPhone owners who have jailbroken their phones in the hundreds of thousands.

As part of the 2009 DMCA rulemaking, EFF has asked the Copyright Office to recognize an exemption to the DMCA to permit jailbreaking in order to allow iPhone owners to use their phones with applications that are not available from Apple’s store (e.g., turn-by-turn directions, using the iPhone camera for video, laptop tethering).

Apple’s copyright infringement claim starts with the observation that jailbroken iPhones depend on modified versions of Apple’s bootloader and operating system software. True enough — we said as much in our technical white paper describing the jailbreak process. But the courts have long recognized that copying software while reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software, a body of law that Apple conveniently fails to mention.

You can read the full article on the EFF’s Blog post titled Apple Says iPhone Jailbreaking is Illegal.

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