As of Sunday, more than 110,00o people have signed a petition at Whitehouse.gov calling on the White House to “ask the Librarian of Congress to rescind this decision, and failing that, champion a bill that makes unlocking permanently legal.” The petition, said CNET chief political correspondent Declan McCullagh in a blog post, is party symbolic. “The Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office are part of the legislative branch, not the executive branch,” he pointed out, “meaning that Obama cannot overturn the decision even if he disagreed with it.”
In an interview McCullagh said “when you have a federal law that says that when you do this you’re liable for all these horrible penalties, it’s just unreasonable. It should be between you and the cell phone carrier… it shouldn’t be a matter of federal prosecutors involved in criminal sanctions.”
Click below to listen to my CBS News/CNET Tech Talk segment featuring Mcullagh.