Apple still silent about DVD Jon's FairPlay hack

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 25 October 2006 11:03

Your IT - Home IT

As we wrote earlier this month, young hacker Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon, has reverse-engineered Fairplay, the digital rights management system used on Apple iPod music players, enabling content from sources other than iTunes to play on iPod. However, Apple still remains silent on the issue.

For the uninitiated, FairPlay is the digital rights management system that restricts songs downloaded from Apple's iTunes store to being played on iPods and not other portable music players. It is also designed to prevent music downloaded from other online stores from being played on iPods.

Seven years ago, Johansen, who was just 15, successfully hacked the DRM of DVDs so that they could play on Linux. However, he claims his FairPlay hack is totally legal because the hack is not actually a hack but a reverse engineered replication of the code.

In fact the native Norwegian, who now lives in San Francisco, is so confident that what he has done is above the board technology achievement, that he has founded a company called DoubleTwist Ventures that plans to license it to Apple rivals.

Apple is not a company known for being shy about taking legal action to protect its intellectual property. However, since the reports about DVD Jon and his activities, the company has remained strangely silent.

This may be because DoubleTwist has not yet actually sold its technology to anyone of note in the music player business. If a deal was actually struck between DoubleTwist and anyone of the ilk of Microsoft, Sony, Creative, Samsung or Sandisk, it is doubtful that Apple would stay silent.