Petition To Legalize Phone Unlocking Reaches 100,000 Signatures

On January 26, it officially became illegal to unlock mobile phones without the carrier's permission, but a White House petition ended up being started to fight back on the ruling, and called for the government to "champion a bill that makes unlocking permanently legal." Just a couple of days before the petition was about to meet its deadline, it edged past the 100,000 signature mark, where it will now be passed onto the Obama administration for consideration.

The petition passed 100,000 signatures earlier this morning, and the White House will now take a look at the law to see why exactly it's illegal to unlock a phone. It took just under a week for the petition to reach a third of its goal, but took several more weeks to achieve the last two-thirds. Either way, the petition is on its way to the White House.

The Library of Congress decided on the ruling last month that unlocking your mobile phone without the permission from your carrier would be illegal. Of course, the chances of getting a carrier to say "yes" to unlocking phones is slim to none, so essentially, it's become more of a challenge to unlock phones legally now.

In any case, we'd like to be optimistic and say that there's a good chance that the Obama administration will at least highly consider overturning the new law, but we'll ultimately have to wait and see what they say. There's no word on when officials will make a public statement about the petition and the law, but it should be fairly soon.