Comments on: You Have Spoken: It’s OK to Hack Your Smartphone

By: Economyst

Economyst — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:48:50 +0000

Intellectual property is a fabricated legal construct. IP laws are day by day are making products and services less enabling and more disabling by adding more caveats, controls, stipulations etc in what you can and cannot do.

A balance must be struck but currently the line is drawn too far in favour of the corporations.

By: Ricky B.

Ricky B. — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:38:00 +0000

It *is* rather scary that the concept of physical property is basically not respected by 6%.

By: Mort

Mort — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:57:20 +0000

It is rather scary that the concept of intellectual property is basically not respected.

By: Richard Garrett

Richard Garrett — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:30:30 +0000

I know its late, the results are already in, but here is my take:
1) If you acquire your phone with a contract, you are obligated to fulfill at least two key provisions of that contract, namely its duration and service level. The provider is most interested in those provisions and enforces them most aggressively. In fact, there is quite a cottage industry on the resale of subsidized phones. As the original acquirer of the subsidized phone you shouldn’t hack the phone.
2) If you acquire a phone through a third party or by fulfilling the duration and service level of your contract, the phone and its software are yours. You should do with them as you please except for –
3) One should never hack a phone for the purpose of stealing service (voice or data) from the provider or another individual.
4) Tethering should only be done according to the provider’s stipulations. (I will admit this is a bit of a gray area; if the provider has a cap, and charges a premium for overages, what difference does it make to the provider if 5gb of usage comes from tethering? Arguably, they want a user to go over the limit and incur incremental charges.)