For everyone who has been holding off  jailbreaking their iPhone for fear of legal ramifications from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), your day has come.  New exemptions were presented by the U.S. Copyright Office this morning allowing for the circumvention of copyright protection in six areas. The six exemptions are:

1. Defeating a lawfully obtained DVD’s encryption for the sole purpose of short, fair use in an educational setting or for criticism

2. Computer programs that allow you to run lawfully obtained software on your phone that you otherwise would not be able to run aka “Jailbreaking” to use Google Voice on your iPhone

3. Computer programs that allow you to use your phone on a different network aka “Jailbreaking” to use your iPhone on T-Mobile

4. Circumventing video game encryption (DRM) for the purposes of legitimate security testing or investigation

5. Cracking computer programs protected by dongles when the dongles become obsolete or are no longer being manufactured

6. Having an ebook be read aloud (i.e for the blind) even if that book has controls built into it to prevent that sort of thing.

[via CrunchGear]

The complete original text can be found here

The big ones for iPhone users are numbers 2 and 3.  If you want to see the big scary world outside of Apple’s beautiful walled garden, you can.  And, if you’re frustrated with a certain proprietary carrier, you can try T-Mobile. Don’t expect either of these goals to be anywhere near as easy as downloading an app though. The revisions released today simply make these actions exempt from prosecution under the DMCA.

The first exemption allows for a wide use of content from lawfully obtained DVDs to be used in non-commercial ways, with a particular impact in education.

The DMCA is reviewed every three years for revisions and because the review took so long the next review is only two years away. Hopefully this will become a trend, and the Librarian of Congress will continue to listen to digital freedom advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Will you be jailbreaking your iPhone now that it’s legal? Are you ready to try out a different network? Do these exemptions mean anything to you?