You may soon be able to legally unlock your cell phone again.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed a bill that would roll back a prohibition on unlocking that took effect early last year. Because the bill, formally known as Senate 517, has already passed the Senate, it will proceed on to the president, who is expected to sign it.
It took 19 months of activism and advocacy, but we re finally very close to consumers regaining the right to unlock the phones they ve legally bought, said Sina Khanifar, a Bay Area-based tech entrepreneur who wrote a petition to the White House immediately after the unlocking ban took effect seeking to have it overturned. It s been a long road against powerful, entrenched interests, but it s great to see citizen advocacy work.
Many cell phones sold today are locked to their carrier, meaning that software inside them prohibits them from being used on another wireless network even if they are technically capable of doing so. The bill would allow consumers to legally be able to break those locks in order to take their phones to another carrier. Under the bill, consumers would be able to unlock the phones themselves or have someone else do it for them.
The House passed a related bill earlier this year. But that bill would have banned bulk unlocking of phones, which might have hindered the market for used devices. The Senate declined to consider that bill; it s rival bill that the House just passed does not include the bulk unlocking prohibition.
Even if President Obama signs the bill, which passed the House on a voice vote, it would provide only a temporary fix to the unlocking controversy. The bill simply overturns regulationsput in place by the Librarian of Congress in 2012. But the Library of Congress is slated to take another look at similar regulations next year, and theoretically could reinstate the ban.
However, given the fact that this Congress, one of the most unproductive in history, actually took the time to overturn the previous ban on unlocking, consumer advocates think it unlikely that the Librarian would put the prohibition back in place. In fact, the bill encourages the Library of Congress to consider allowing other devices that connect to cellular networks to be unlocked, such as tablets.
The unlocking controversy has been years in the making. It stems from an obscure provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was intended to better protect copyrighted works in the digital age. That law made it illegal for anyone to break a software lock that was put in place to prevent copying or modifying digital works. But the law also empowered the Librarian of Congress to periodically consider and approve exemptions to that rule.
In 2006, the Librarian of Congress approved an exception to the rule for cell phone unlocking and then extended that exception in 2010. In late 2012, however, the Librarian decided to end the exemption, arguing that because consumers could find plenty of unlocked phones on the market, they no longer needed to be able to unlock locked phones.
Plenty of consumers and consumer activists — including yours truly — disagreed. Khanifar s petition drew more than 114,000 signatures in little more than two months. In response, Obama administration representatives publicly voiced support for repealing the ban on unlocking.
Photo by Don Ryan, Associated Press.
