Jail-breaking law change will have limited impact: analysts, companies

The impact of the Copyright Office's cell phone jail-breaking decision probably won't have a big practical effect, analysts say.

For one: breaking open locked devices to download unauthorized applications takes some technical savvy. A separate copyright law prevents a cottage industry of breaking open phones. "It does not extend to allow businesses to set up services and tools to allow those individuals to crack the access controls, which is prohibited by another section of the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act]," wrote Rebecca Arbogast, head of tech policy research at Stifel Nicholaus. "So this means that clever, tech-savvy people can take advantage of this, aided by operations that are providing some tools to help them, but large-scale business models to provide a widely available service are unlikely to spring up because they still have liability risk."