Recently the tech freedom activists behind Electronic Frontier Foundation asked for help in the fight for keeping jailbreaking a legal act. People from EFF wanted their supporters to leave comments on the website of US Copyright office in support of jailbreaking. The comments section on their website was shut down ten days ago, and following this, Copyright office shared the posted comments online. There were only 700 recorded posts made, but some real big names in the iOS jailbreak world were adding their weight to this fight. One of those important figures from the jailbreak community was the famous Saurik, owner and maintainer of Cydia, the unofficial app store for iOS. Jay Freeman, which is the real name of Saurik, added more than 5 pages of his thoughts and facts on why the jailbreaking is legal and why it needs to stay legal in the future.

Among other reasons he wrote that many developers were not satisfied with the imposed artificial limitations, thus they have taken on the task of escaping from the jail (aka jailbreaking)! The tools they developed for this process have later become known as jailbreak tools like RedSn0w, Sn0wBreeze, PwnageTools etc. The main function of these tools was to install third party apps and tweaks on jailbroken devices. The jailbreaks were based on different processes, depending on the approach used by developers. Some of these were rooting, bootloader based jailbreaks and a number of other processes. The jailbreak is generally speaking easy and safe if you know what you are doing, but the various approaches and ensuing results are somewhat different.
Some actions after the jailbreak were more or less difficult, so for example it isn’t as easy to upgrade the device firmware after the jailbreak without removing the jailbreak completely. Of course: you can upgrade the device but you need to use the so called custom firmware upgrade option. This involves a process where you use the jailbreak tool to create a custom firmware which is afterwards loaded onto the device.

Saurik’s whole comment is an interesting read, and you can check it out in its whole length on the US Copyright office website. Two years ago, US courts ruled out that jailbreaking is indeed legal, but the decision could expire this year. If for some unknown reason the Copyright office does not confirm the legality of jailbreaking, the decision could again become used against people deciding to jailbreak their own devices.