Unlocking a cell phone you own so it works on a different carrier's network is legal in the United States today, and has been squarely legal since August 2014. Getting to that plain answer, though, means passing through one of the oddest episodes in modern copyright law, in which a routine consumer act briefly became a plausible federal offense under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention rule, 17 U.S.C. Section 1201. This article explains how the carrier lock on a phone became entangled with an anti-piracy statute, how the Copyright Office's triennial rulemaking granted, revoked, and then restored the unlocking exemption, and how a record-setting petition produced the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act of 2014. It works through the unresolved circuit split over whether circumvention must have any connection to copyright infringement at all, separates the frequently confused acts of unlocking, jailbreaking, and rooting, and maps the separate copyright, contract, and warranty questions that each carry different answers. It closes with worked hypotheticals, a detailed FAQ, and the connection between phone unlocking and the larger right-to-repair fight, all of which run on the same section of the statute.