Yahoo! News is reporting that the FCC announced the practice of unlocking a cell phone is legitimate under fair-use rules and therefore legal.

This weekend has seen a flurry of activity about digital rights, but the biggest news dropped Monday morning, when the FCC announced that it had made the controversial practice of 'jailbreaking' your iPhone - or any other cell phone - legal.

While technically illegal, no one has been sued or prosecuted for the practice. (Apple does seriously frown on the practice, and jailbreaking your phone will still void your warranty.) It's estimated that more than a million iPhone owners have jailbroken their handsets.

Apple fought hard against the legalization, arguing that jailbreaking was a form of copyright violation. The FCC disagreed, saying that jailbreaking merely enhanced the inter-operability of the phone, and was thus legitimate under fair-use rules.

This law makes it legal for you to jailbreak your phone but apple still has the right to revoke the warranty if you jailbreak it on the basis that the pnly reason to do this is to use it for illegal activities. I know that this is not comlpetely true but they have the power to state that it does because of the warranty that they choose to put in place. The only major change that this makes is that now the people making the software are not in a legal grey area and apple has no reason to send out updates trying to stop jailbreaking.