Disclaimer: I run an unlocking business.

Not exactly the same thing, but operator unlocking was deemed legal in 2013...

https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-13-041/statement-regarding-whit...

...and measures were put in place to oblige operators to assist consumers in unlocking their phones.

Fast forward to 2018, and nothing really has changed. Unlocking a phone legally via you operator is a nightmare. They'll make you jump through 17 hoops and you will give up. Customer retention is key.

When operator unlocking is not possible, rooting a phone or playing with base settings is the only way, so this is great news.

However, I have a strange feeling that things won't get much easier. As has happened with operators, hardware manufacturers will go to great lengths to protect their playground.

I'm hoping this is broader than it appears. For example, a mobile phone is assumed to receive updates to its software for, let's say, security purposes, and the customer may well consider that to be a real factor in deciding to buy the phone. If the manufacturer stops issuing security updates, I would read this exemption as protecting work to ensure that phone can continue being secured, even if that's by community patches that are backported, or even by installing another OS that is still supported. I have no idea if this interpretation would fly legally, but it passes the common sense test: just because a manufacturer decided to stop issuing patches for your phone doesn't mean you should have to choose between spending hundreds more for a new phone and being totally exposed to security vulnerabilities, all in the name of a copyright law that designed to prevent piracy (presumably).

I don't think so, FTA: "“I read it as the ability to reset to factory settings,” Nathan Proctor, head of consumer rights group US PIRG’s right to repair efforts, told me in an email.

Although you could make an argument that the device never performed according to its specifications and your unlocking the device is merely an attempt to repair a fundamentally broken product, but that seems like it'd be a hard sell.

Yeah, sounds very narrow. Basically you can take things apart for repair, but not to turn them into something else, or modify them for interoperability.

But it does create a gray market for the information obtained by people who legally break DRM for "repair and maintenance." Information set free can be used for anything, wink wink.

Could interoperability be argued to be returning them to their original specifications in some cases?

E.g. the product could interact with most computers when it came out, but since then a competitor has come onto the scene and the manufacturer hasn't implemented features to make it work with them. Therefore, jailbreaking and making it work with them would sort of be returning to what the situation was when you first purchased.

17 U.S. Code § 1201 (f) already seems to provide some protection for reverse-engineering (including the circumvention of "technical measures") if it's done for the purpose of making a program interoperable with other programs.