Should You Go to Jail for Unlocking Your Phone?

"Who owns your phone at the end of the day?" asks Derek Khanna, a visiting fellow at Yale Law and former staff member at the Republican Study Committee.

Last fall, Khanna earned notoriety—and a pink slip—for a public memo urging GOP members of Congress to rethink their stance on copyright law.

More recently, in a column for The Atlantic, Khanna blasted a new ruling that criminalizes the unlocking of cellphones under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Unlocking the phone simply means that a person could use a phone designed for one carrier on another carrier, assuming they had switched his plan. In addition to civil penalties, breaking this law could land you in prison for up to five years and force you to pay a fine of up to $500,000.

"In 1998 a poorly written statute, the DMCA, was passed and it prohibited a wide swath of commonly used technology in the name of defending copyright," Khanna explains. "If this is allowed to stand, then the answer is you don't own your phone."

A White House petition to change the law recently reached the 100,000 signature threshold, which means the Obama administration will have to give an opinion on the matter.

Khanna sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss the unlocking your cellphone, the flaws in the DMCA, and why he was fired from the Republican Study Committee after writing a paper condemning current copyright law.

Follow Derek Khanna on Twitter here.

Follow Nick Gillespie on Twitter here.

About 17 minutes.

Produced by Meredith Bragg. Shot by Amanda Winkler and Meredith Bragg.

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