Although certain smartphone makers frown upon having the public jailbreak their precious devices, for quite some time now the art of jailbreaking has been around, and most noticeably to do with the Apple iPhone.

Well according to an article over on Electric Pig by Toby Knight, via the iPhone Dev Team and much to the chagrin of smartphone makers no doubt, the US Library of Congress has amended the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and basically made jailbreaking legal in the US.

Just over a year and a half ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation partitioned the Library of Congress asking for an exemption to be made to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to enable smartphone users to modify software of handsets they own without contravening said act.

The ruling states… “While a copyright owner might try to restrict the programs that can be run on a particular operating system, copyright law is not the vehicle for imposition of such restrictions.”

Now that doesn’t mean the likes of Apple will allow jailbreaking their iPhone, as they still have the right to release updated operating systems to block and prevent jailbreaks, but it does mean they can’t bring in the lawyers to force people to stop doing it.