Today, the President fulfilled his promise to sign the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act. This means it's once again legal to unlock your cell phone to use on other carriers. However, the move is only temporary. Here's what happened and how it affects you.


The new law reinstates an old copyright exemption…


The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is currently the reason that unlocking cell phones is illegal. Technically, unlocking your phone to use on other carriers without permission constitutes "circumventing technological measures" that protect software copyrights. However, every three years, the Library of Congress can make specific exemptions to this law. In other words, they can decide that it's legal to unlock your smartphone, even if the original law said it's not.

Up until 2012, the Library implemented an exemption to the DMCA that made it legal to unlock your smartphone even without permission. However, that exemption was not renewed in 2012. As of 2013, cell phone unlocking became illegal (sort of). That didn't mean you could never unlock your phone, but newer phones required some hoops to jump through.

Is Unlocking Your Phone Really Illegal? Legal protection for people who unlock their mobile phones to use them on other networks expired… Read more

As of today, this is no longer the case. Earlier this month, Congress passed a bill that reinstated the old DMCA exemption for the next year (until the Library of Congress convenes again), and the President signed it into law today. That means everything you were able to do prior to January 2013, you can now do again.


...and it could be only temporary…


The law that's being passed doesn't actually change any existing laws; it just provides an exemption. The DMCA still says that circumventing copy-protection measures is illegal, and you still need to do that in order to unlock your phone without your carrier's help.

However, there's one other thing the law does. It instructs the Library of Congress to consider not only reinstating the exemption again in the future, but expanding it to other devices like tablets. This means there's a pretty good chance that the exemption will continue to be reinstated in the future. It's not exactly an empowering thing when both houses of Congress and the President of the United States team up to tell you that you made the wrong call.


However, ultimately, the power is still in the Librarian of Congress' hands. The new law doesn't guarantee you can unlock cell phones forever. You only get that guarantee for one year. After that, we have to keep making the same argument before the Librarian every three years until a law gets passed that guarantees cell phone unlocking will be legal forever. Which is a much harder bill (and may require amending the DMCA.) It'd be pretty shocking if the Librarian elected not to renew the exemption in 2015 after this, but the rest of the future is uncertain.

...but it will still be a fight either way


At the end of the day, this is still a lot of arguing about one of the smaller problems with the telecoms industry. Not everyone is affected by the unlock ban. You can buy phones that are carrier unlocked to start with, even the exemptions put in place in 2013 allowed you to unlock older phones without talking to a carrier. You can also usually unlock older phones, or phones no longer under contract by simply calling your carrier and asking.

Even if you do unlock it, network incompatibility makes unlocking largely impractical to begin with. For example, you can't unlock an AT&T (GSM) phone and take it to Verizon (CDMA). Even on the same types of networks, the lack of radios supporting all the various 3G and 4G bands the carriers use means that unlocking an AT&T phone to use on T-Mobile still might result in you only getting 2G data access. In fact, unlocked or not, you need to go through a length process to find a phone that works on your network.


That's not to say that it doesn't matter. Not being able to unlock your smartphone is a problem for some people, and it sets a bad precedent for the larger industry. In other countries, phone portability is a lot more common, and the handset market is better for it. However, here in the US, the DMCA is only one of the things that gets in the way of smartphone portability.


This new legislation is definitely a step in the right direction for cell phone portability. However (and unfortunately), this still means that if you need an unlocked phone, buying one that's not attached to a carrier is still your safest bet. If you're unsure about whether or not you would need a carrier unlocked phone, you can read our guide here.


The takeaway from today's news is that you don't have to worry if you need to unlock your phone and your carrier won't help you out. It's no longer illegal to seek help elsewhere. However, the issue is far from settled, both in terms of this particular roadblock, and the other ones we haven't even dealt with yet.

Photos by RJ Schmidt , Sebastian Bergmann , hn. , and Martin Langsholt .