Unlocking a phone from a carrier network has been going on for years. Most of the time it's completely benign in nature and used only to allow users to drift from cellular providers at will, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc.
But it has now become illegal to unlock a cell phone, because the U.S. Copyright Office and Library of
Congress are no longer allowing phone unlocking as an exemption under
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
The wording in the official docket says basically, you are not allowed to unlock a phone unless you have the carriers permission to do so. 'It wasn't a good ruling,' Rebecca Jeschke, a digital rights analyst at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told ABC News. 'You should be
able to unlock your phone. This law was meant to combat copyright
infringement, not to prevent people to do what they want to do with the
device they bought.'