Why It's Suddenly Illegal to "Unlock" Your New Cell Phone

If you buy something, it’s yours, to do with as you want. Right? Don’t be silly.

We first encountered the concept of limited ownership with purchases that lacked any physical existence, like e-books and online music. If I buy an online movie from Amazon, I can watch it on my Kindle Fire forever – but I can’t donate it to my local library. I can buy a book for my Kindle reader, but having read it, cannot pass it on to my wife. We don’t fully own these things because they’re not really things. They are made of bits, not atoms. What we buy is only a license for particular uses.

But when we buy an actual thing, made of atoms, then it’s ours, and we can use it in any way that we want. Not anymore. Not if the thing is a cell phone. A phone configured for a particular carrier is said to be “locked.” Before it can be used with a different carrier, it must be “unlocked.” It is possible to buy an unlocked phone and take it to the carrier of your choice. But that has a downside: you will pay full price for the phone and probably pay the same monthly carrier rate as someone who bought the same phone at a steep discount. It is also possible to unlock the phone you already have, just by downloading and running software from the Internet. Not hard to do – but it might get you hauled up before a federal district judge.