“It wasn’t a good ruling,” Rebecca Jeschke, a digital rights analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told ABC News. “You should be able to unlock your phone. This law was meant to combat copyright infringement, not to prevent people to do what they want to do with the device they bought.”…

If your phone has already been unlocked, you are grandfathered in and won’t face any legal issues. But what could happen if you unlocked your phone now that it’s illegal?

“Violations of the DMCA [unlocking your phone] may be punished with a civil suit or, if the violation was done for commercial gain, it may be prosecuted as a criminal act,” Brad Shear, a Washington, D.C.-area attorney and blogger who is an expert on social media and technology law, told ABC News. “A carrier may sue for actual damages or for statutory damages.”