Even assuming Congress wants to leave the broader problems of the DMCA alone for now, we can do much better. In this blog post, I give a brief background on the DMCA and its relation to phone unlocking, take a close look at each of the congressional proposals and suggest what an effective unlocking fix would look like. Both the Obama administration and the FCC have come out in favor of allowing American citizens to unlock their cell phones, contrary to legislation imposed by the Librarian of Congress which went into effect earlier this year.

Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, takes a look at some of the proposals already on the table to make it happen and suggests a different course of action. Worth a read.