[General Questions and Answers] nuclearDave:
About "The Law"

Steve, I don't think you are going to get the reply you are looking\hoping for. There is no law forcing the vendor to provide you with an unlock code, ever. All those types of considerations and protections for both the vendor and their customers are provided for by the contract you and the vendor enter into when you two come to an agreement and sign that contract at the beginning of your relationship. The vendor promises to provide services for a period of time and you promise to provide Valuable Consideration "money" for these services. There are LEGAL recourses provided for in the fine print for each of you should either party fail to comply with their promises to the other party. The signing of the contract is what I think the original poster meant by "it's the law". It's not the law but, the contract makes all of the agreements and promises stated within it legally binding. The law is simple contract law. Signing the contract may also limit or eliminate any legal recourse you have against the vendor, so read it carefully as you can sign away any rights you may have had. Now the vendor will usually provide you with an unlock code after your contract ends because they have recovered any loss they took by providing you with a discounted or free phone, That is all they are trying to do and they are entitled to that. They will make provisions for active duty military service members who will be deployed or transferred to somewhere their service is unavailable. If you wish to have your phone unlocked before that amount of time you can pay for that service from thousands of vendors all over the internet or at your local mall. They are everywhere! The phone vendor has no interest in helping you to unlock before the contract ends as your intentions are usually to switch services and default on your contract in which case they will sue you for what you would have had to pay them plus all the legal fees, late charges, interest on the unpaid balance, etc etc etc. So, I hope this fully answers your questions and I can't imagine that it wouldn't as I got long winded as to cover all the bases with all the reasons "why?". I do this to try to avoid all of the "but why...?" responses that can turn a simple posting into a life's work. I also hope this satisfies the moderator's responsibilities to make sure that this site doesn't appear to be just another hackers site with the cover of a legitimate developers forum. I'm a very new member of this site and this is only my second posting. I provide tech assistance on several sites for programming and provide assistance when application or system failures occur and the consumer sends in one of those "OH S**T!! HELP ME!!!" requests and I'll walk him\her through the problem to the solution which usually is read the instructions or learn the language you are attempting to write code in . With all the flavors of linux out there. Good luck Steve and try to remember that when someone says "it's the law", at least 95% of the time they really don't know what they are talking about and that "the law" is what they think it is or want it to be. NuclearDave "David".