Apple Says iPhone Jailbreaking is 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.
Context & Ripple Effects
This filing marks Apple's first formal public legal position on iPhone jailbreaking, converting what had been informal pressure into an explicit copyright argument. It extends a campaign that began in 2007, when Apple warned early unlockers their phones could be permanently bricked and issued its first official statement on unauthorized modification Apple's first official statement on iPhone unlocks.
By framing jailbreaking as a DMCA violation rather than a contract issue, Apple moves the fight from its own terms of service into the Copyright Office's triennial rulemaking — a venue where exemptions are actually decided. That shift set up the arguments Apple would escalate later in 2009, including claims about network reliability its cellphone-tower crash warnings, and the exemption battle whose outcome Apple answered in 2010 by declaring any granted exemption voids your warranty.
First-order effects
- Jailbreak developers and users now face an explicit legal threat — not just warranty risk — as Apple formally asserts that modifying the iPhone's bootloader constitutes copyright infringement under the DMCA.
- The Copyright Office rulemaking becomes the decisive battleground: EFF-backed exemption petitions must now answer Apple's infringement argument directly rather than argue around it.
Second-order effects
- Carriers and other handset makers gain a template: if Apple's DMCA theory holds in the rulemaking, expect similar copyright-based objections from locked-down device vendors facing unlocking communities.
- The stance puts Apple in an awkward rhetorical spot — weeks later it was caught using a jailbroken iPhone in its own patent filings Apple's use of a jailbroken iPhone in a patent application — handing ammunition to exemption advocates.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, control over post-sale modification becomes a recurring regulatory question rather than a vendor-consumer dispute — pushing decisions about who owns a device's software out of contracts and into periodic federal rulemakings.
- The cat-and-mouse dynamic this formalizes points toward jailbreaking migrating from a mass consumer practice to a niche expert pursuit, as each legal and technical escalation raises the cost of participation.
The trend: Platform owners are increasingly turning to copyright law, rather than terms-of-service enforcement alone, to lock down hardware they sell — making triennial DMCA rulemakings the recurring arbiter of user modification rights.