On 10/28/2013 10:03 PM, Michael Spacefalcon wrote:
* Most of the Openmoko community sees my FreeCalypso work as being
illegal, because they have voluntarily chosen to live and/or accept
citizenship in repressive countries which deem it to be so. I suspect
that the power-keepers of the Om Wiki would not want to have anything
to do with my illegal project and its equally illegal fruits.
Speaking personally, and from a UK perspective, your work is not illegal
in the UK as such.
Someone can freely load it onto a calypso device, and use it in a
completely shielded room.
Or perhaps even after requesting the appropriate permissions use it
on-air. (I suspect this will be
impractical in the UK).
However, once anyone has used your work to change the IMSI of their
phone (this needs to lead to
no other offence), and you are aware of this, if you do not stop
distribution, you are liable to conviction
and a term of imprisonment not to exceed 5 years.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/31/section/2
This is a poorly drawn bit of legislation, and in principle could also
cover the operator of any
website hosting such code, once the operator becomes aware that they are
facilitating this.
In principle, this could lead to an EU arrest warrant, or even a request
for extradition.
There are separate issues around the IP that you do not have permission
to use.
In practice - I would be truly astonished if, unless the above tool were
to be used in a very serious
crime, as one of its critical elements, any conviction would result.
There were 5 convictions in 2004-5. I'm unable to find any recent ones.
The above law is justified IMO - simply as reprogramming a phones IMSI
removes it from the UK block
list. This means that it has lots more value, and can be resold. It
having more value means that criminals
will attempt to take it from people, with the use of force.
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