Pluralistic: Jailbreaking isn't theft (25 Jun 2026)

A panel moderator in Toronto described jailbreaking an iPhone as 'rampant theft of IP,' sparking debate over digital sovereignty. The author argues that Canada's 2012 Copyright Modernization Act, which criminalizes jailbreaking, ties the country's hands against US tech giants that can remotely disable devices and services. The law was passed under a US trade promise that has since been broken, leaving Canada vulnerable to digital sovereignty threats.

Today's links Jailbreaking isn't theft: It wasn't progress when they did it, it's not piracy when we do it back to them. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Major AI breakthrough; Disney v Pooh tombstone; Vancouver riot kiss; Farage admits Brexit lies; Protecting the web from its founders; Sanders x Hillary; Surveillance pricing v your dollars. Upcoming appearances: Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Jailbreaking isn't theft permalink It's not often that someone on a panel says something that makes my jaw drop, but that's what happened earlier this week when the moderator of a panel I was on in Toronto described jailbreaking an iPhone as "rampant theft of IP." Some context: the panel was in Toronto, and the nominal subject was "digital sovereignty," though all the panelists except me interpreted that to mean "sovereign AI." All of their interventions were focused on how Canada could build and operate its own AI, which I found very weird, since there is no AI-related threat to Canadian sovereignty. If Donald Trump ordered OpenAI and Anthropic to turn off all of Canada's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change: every firm, ministry and household would operate as per normal: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/ Now, that's not to say that Canada doesn't have a digital sovereignty problem – it really does Donald Trump and US Big Tech have fused into a single entity and Trump now orders US tech giants to terminate the online accounts of foreign officials who displease him. When Microsoft turns off your Office365 account, you lose your working files, your calendar, your address book, your email archives, and the Outlook email address you use to log in to every online service: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/ own-goal So while turning off Canada's chatbots would not inflict any real harm on Canada, M365 terminations could paralyse any federal or provincial ministry, any structurally important firm, and most Canadian households. The threat doesn't stop there: Trump can also order Apple and Google to brick any of Canada's iPhones or Android devices – terminating individual officials' mobile access, or terminating whole provinces. It's not just iPhones either – Trump can also brick any tractor in Canada: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ This is the real digital sovereignty risk, and Canada needs to address it now. But Canada can't – our hands are tied…by us. In 2012, we passed a law, The Copyright Modernization Act, that criminalizes "jailbreaking," meaning that Canadian companies can't go into business figuring out how to install different app stores on phones and consoles, or change the firmware in tractors to enable independent repair, or reliably export their cloud data to rival Canadian services: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/ cancon Why did we pass this law? Because the Americans promised us free trade and no tariffs on our exports if we agreed to it. That's a promise Trump tore up, but we're still holding up our end of the bargain. That's crazy. It means that American companies can use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian businesses that offer the Canadian people tools to help them escape Big Tech's sleazy ripoffs of their data and cash. And boy do those US tech companies take in a lot of cash. The US ad-tech duopoly of Google/Meta rig the advertising market, taking 51% out of every ad dollar through an illegal, collusive arrangement called "Jedi Blue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi Blue The US mobile tech duopoly takes 30 cents out of every dollar spent via an app, by forcing every app vendor to use their payment processors, which charge 1,000% more than any other payment processor in Canada. That means that every time a subscriber to a Canadian news site signs up through an app, 30% of the lifetime subscription revenue for that Canadian subscriber is funneled to one of two California companies. The corollary, of course, is that if Canadian businesses were free to compete with US companies – if Canada stopped foolishly holding up its end of the bargain that Trump has dishonoured – then it would be as though every Canadian news outlet increased its subscriber base by 25% overnight What's more, the Canadian companies that sell those jailbreaking tools would make billions out of US Big Tech's billions. And that's where the moderator of this week's panel comes in. When I finished making this pitch, they turned to the rest of the panel and said something like, "Well, apart from rampant theft of IP, what else could Canada do to secure its digital sovereignty?" That's when my jaw dropped. Making it possible for, say, a Canadian company to sell its own Canadian game to a Canadian customer, in Canada, without giving Apple or Xbox 30% of the purchase price, is not "theft of IP." It's not "theft of IP" for a rightsholder to sell their own products to their customers. It's not "theft of IP" for a Canadian owner of a device to decide for themselves which software they want to run on it. If buying software from the company that made it and installing it on a device you own is "theft of IP," then so is putting non-Nike shoelaces in your Air Jordans. It's not "theft of IP." It's just good business. Moreover, it's the kind of good business that created America's tech giants in the first place. As Jeff Bezos tells his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." US tech giants make whopping margins around the world, thanks to the anticircumvention laws that the US Trade Rep crammed down every US trading partner's throats, laws that allow US companies to use other countries' legal system to destroy their competitors. I've been mulling this "rampant theft of IP" remark for a couple of days now, but it wasn't until a reader wrote to me to remind me about Apple's origin story that I realised what the punchline is. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak financed their first product launch by selling "Blue Boxes" devices that let you make free long distance calls by cheating the phone company door to door in the UC Berkeley dorms: https://macdailynews.com/2024/06/19/steve-jobs-felt-certain-apple-would-never-have-existed-without-woz-and-him-making-blue-boxes/ Now, I'm not going to weep for the lost revenues that Jobs and Woz denied to AT&T. After all, AT&T was stealing that money from its customers, which is why, just a few years later, a federal court convicted AT&T of monopolistic practices and broke the company up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup of the Bell System But the legal term for what a Blue Box does is "toll theft," which is to say, Apple – a company literally founded on theft – now makes the majority of its profits by convincing people that making a competing product is literally stealing. A company whose founders got their seed capital by marketing illegal circumvention devices now markets products designed to make it a crime for a rightsholder to sell their own work to you. I've long said that "every pirate wants to be an admiral": https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/ picks-and-shovels But this is just a little too on the nose. When Apple went into business selling products to rip off the phone company, that wasn't progress. When Canadians go into business selling devices that let iPhone owners use their own property to do legal things – like buying copyrighted works directly from their creators – that is not piracy. Canada has a real digital sovereignty problem, and it's not AI. Canada will not mitigate its digital sovereignty risk by successfully launching a Made in Canada version of the money-losingest venture in the history of the human species: https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/ Canada's real digital sovereignty problem is its reliance on the apps, cloud services and devices that are tethered to the American cloud, access to which Donald Trump could – and does – terminate whenever he feels grumpy. Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and turn us into "the 51st state." He's trying to steal Alberta right now. Our digital sovereignty risk is the risk of Trump paralysing our country in order to steal Alberta – or the entire shop. We can address that digital sovereignty risk – and make billions at the same time – by legalising jailbreaking and becoming the world's "disenshittification nation." Unlike a program to build Canadian AI, this will make billions, not lose them – and unlike Canadian AI, this will make our country more resilient and safer, by delivering products that Canadians – and the world – want to buy and will pay us a fortune for. Big Tech's margins are our opportunity. 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Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein Exile in Bookville , Jun 26 https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628 London: Idler Festival, Jul 11 https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/ Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr Brighton Dome , Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn Foyle's Picadilly , Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow Notre Dame , Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances permalink How to Mess with Big Tech Oligarchs Fighting Fascism https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-mess-with-big-tech-oligarchs-w-cory-doctorow/id1888647397?i=1000773711479 Reverse Centaur with Angie Coiro Kepler's Books https://www.youtube.com/live/cWN6XBa73xA How to Think About AI Before It’s Too Late Galaxy Brain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPQNPJ0CEPo The future of world governance, with Kim Stanley Robinson UN Independent Expert on International Order https://www.youtube.com/live/wJvBvYdaAMY How to Think About Artificial Intelligence KUER https://radiowest.kuer.org/show/radiowest/2026-06-16/cory-doctorow-on-how-to-think-about-artificial-intelligence Latest books permalink "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/ chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books US , Head of Zeus UK , February 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels . "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books US , Head of Zeus UK , February 2024 thebezzle.org . "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books US , Head of Zeus UK , November 2023 http://lost-cause.org . "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech Verso September 2023 http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org . Signed copies at Book Soup https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245 . "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books permalink "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" the graphic novel , Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon permalink Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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