Apple will sell unlocked iPhones in France next May to comply with a French law that prohibits a mobile phone from being tied to an exclusive wireless carrier for longer than six months. What will this mean for iPhone’s future?

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Owners of unlocked iPhones are rightfully nervous after Apple said yesterday that it “has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs … will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed.”

Worse, if your unlocked iPhone breaks, Apple will not fix it under the warranty, which they say becomes void if you tamper with the iPhone software.

Panic over having your unlocked iPhone damaged by an Apple software update may or may not be justified. One user on an Apple Discussions thread thinks “Apple is going to make it sound a lot worse than it actually is since they are the ones who don’t want you to do it in the first place,” referring to the software unlock that lets you use your iPhone on cell phone networks other than AT&T.

I’m writing today to prove that Apple has no legal right to break your unlocked iPhone, according to U.S. Copyright law. There’s a lot of hard-to-understand technical jargon on the U.S. Copyright Office website, but bear with me and I’ll translate to English:

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Hacker Jon Lech Johansen, most famous for his work decoding copy-protected DVDs, has discovered how to activate the iPhone “without giving any of your money or personal information to AT&T.”

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