verizon phone lockdown illegal?   (geekin, opinion, random re me)

IANAL, but I just got a new phone and rather than paying Verizon to pull my old phone numbers off my lame LG VX6000, I transferred them over manually, culling the lame ducks in the process. So if I tell you I don't have your phone number anymore, you should laugh nervously. And then I read this article and thought perhaps what they did was illegal...?

If I don't want to have my data trapped in a proprietary format, I will avoid those proprietary applications. What is the sense of using the proprietary application and then asking for an open source tool to access the data?

You own your data, even when it's trapped in a proprietary application. There is a term in American law, conversion, for the act of refusing to give back property of others that has been entrusted to you for safekeeping. This is probably illegal wherever you live, too, and when proprietary vendors trap your data and refuse to let you get at it except through their application, they may be committing a crime.