As of Saturday, your options for owning an unlocked phone become far more limited. You can ask your carrier to unlock it—and good luck with that—or you can pay a premium to manufacturers like Apple or Google for a new unlocked phone. You just can’t unlock your phone yourself—at least, not legally.

That decision was made not by voters, the courts, or even Congress. It was made by one man, 83-year-old Congressional Librarian James Hadley Billington, who is responsible for interpreting the meaning of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Billington decided last October that unlocking your phone yourself is a violation of the Act, which was originally written to prevent digital piracy.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/25/unlocking_change/

Cool law, but won't be enforced.

I second this.

Good luck with that.

land of the free

Seems this 83year old was paid extremly well by the phone producers for this interpretation

Who had ruled that it was legal initially, the same guy?

Anyway, it flies in the face of established consumer law. Anyone who gets prosecuted under this should get the ACLU on their case and smack the big telecoms companies in their face.

I wonder how they are going to enforce this.
Maybe they will put detectors in new phones so that when you try to unlock them the SWAT can break down your doors and windows so they can arrest you? Hmm... that seems about right!

A phone is your property, you should be able to hack if you want. So much for the land of the free, it's increasingly more like the land of the repressed. Yet another law, that will be ignored by many.

They don't need to enforce this. They can use this to charge you at their own discretion.