IB Times: Unlocking Your Phone Could Land You In Jail Under TPP

No more phone unlocking allowed, folks. Article by Mike Brown for IB Times The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) final negotiation text was released Thursday by the Obama administration, and it has privacy and digital rights advocates up in arms. They fear the TPP could greatly restrict the way consumers around the world use technology, while providing little recourse for appeals and overriding decisions by national legislatures and regulatory bodies.

No more phone unlocking allowed, folks.

Article by Mike Brown for IB Times

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) final negotiation text was released Thursday by the Obama administration, and it has privacy and digital rights advocates up in arms. They fear the TPP could greatly restrict the way consumers around the world use technology, while providing little recourse for appeals and overriding decisions by national legislatures and regulatory bodies.

For example, the Obama administration last year made it legal to unlock your phone for use on any carrier. The TPP could reverse that, said Evan Greer, campaign director of nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future. He cited article 18.68 of the TPP as having the potential to override that bill. These measures, Greer said, concern themselves with digital rights management (DRM), which is used to protect copyrighted work. Unlocking your phone could fall under a circumvention of the DRM that governs the software on your device. "The TPP appears to criminalize those types of practices," Greer told International Business Times.

Critics say the TPP, under negotiation by 12 Pacific Rim countries, including the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, Vietnam and New Zealand, would take some of the more onerous parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and extend them globally.

- Read more at IB Times