The "Unlocked Phones" Ruling: The Facts

As a Thanksgiving present to American consumers, the US copyright office last week recommended that Americans be allowed to unlock their cell phones. This is so enticing, so exciting, and so confusing, that I thought I'd give a little rundown on what it actually does and doesn't mean. Because cell phone carriers sell you phones at deep discounts, they want to prevent you from grabbing a discounted phone, cancelling your service and porting it over to another carrier. There are two ways they can do this. They can either lock the phone itself to work only with their carrier's SIM cards (Cingular and T-Mobile do this) or they can have a permission list of allowed phones on their network, and refuse to enable any phones they don't sell. (Verizon and Sprint do this.)

The copyright office ruling says it will be legal to disable phone-based SIM locks. What this means, most importantly, is that Cingular and T-Mobile users will be allowed to take their phones with them if they decide to switch between those two carriers. It will have no effect on Verizon or Sprint customers, because they use network-based permission lists.

More after the jump

T-Mobile and Cingular already unlock phones for long-term customers who ask politely. The ruling, though, means that you'll also be able to legally go to third parties, whether on the Web or in a shopping mall, to get your phone unlocked, and not get any guff from T-Mobile or Cingular about it.

The ruling says nothing about "hacking" your phone to enable or change features. That's always been basically OK, though carriers don't generally repair or give tech support for phones you break through hacking.

And it says nothing about buying unlocked phones overseas or from distributors like dynamism.com. That's also always been OK, though you have to enter a few arcane settings to get full Internet access on your phone with Cingular or T-Mobile. (The settings are available on the Web.

The ruling won't let you move Cingular/T-Mobile phones to Sprint/Verizon, or use Nextel phones on any other network. That's not a legal issue - the networks just use different, incompatible technology.

Another thing the ruling won't let you do is use a T-Mobile Sidekick on any carrier other than T-Mobile. That's because the Sidekick requires special servers that only T-Mobile has.