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(Apple would not comment for this story.) And Johansen says he is abiding by the letter of the law - if not, perhaps, its spirit. FairPlay is not patented, most likely because the encryption algorithms it uses are in the public domain. There's an obvious question: Isn't opening the iTunes system illegal? There is no obvious answer. "This guy is a disruptive force unto himself." "We all talk about disruptive forces in business," says Mike McGuire, an analyst at the Gartner Group. He also became something of an icon to hard-core geeks: When Johansen announced on his blog that he was selling the old iPod he had used to break FairPlay, a Berkeley researcher bought it to keep as a souvenir. "I really became interested in these issues," he says. Johansen, who had left high school at 16 to become a programmer, testified in the 2600 case and became frustrated that companies could prohibit customers from using a product the way they wanted.
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The movie studios used that law to successfully sue a hacker magazine called 2600 that linked to DeCSS on its Web site. The movie studios didn't like that decision, which almost certainly would have been different in the U.S., where the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA, for short) prohibits circumventing digital-rights-management technology (or DRM) for any reason. For his role in writing DeCSS, Johansen was charged with breaking the Norwegian law that prohibits gaining unauthorized access to data, then was acquitted twice when courts ruled the data were his own. "I don't like closed systems."Ĭompanies that rely on closed systems don't much care for him, either. "Today's reality is that there's this iTunes-iPod ecosystem that excludes everyone else from the market," says Johansen.
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So far, DoubleTwist consists of four cubicles in a generic-looking glass-and-steel building in Redwood Shores, Calif., one client, and no full-time employees other than Johansen and co-founder Monique Farantzos.Īs he and Farantzos explain DoubleTwist in a conference room they share with several other companies, he points to a sheet of printer paper tacked on the wall that has a typed quote Jobs gave the Wall Street Journal in 2002: "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own." As Johansen sees it, Jobs didn't follow through on this promise, so it's up to him to fix the system, just as he fixed the software for his father's camera.
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Starting this fall, his new company, DoubleTwist, will license them to anyone who wants to get into the digital-music business - and doesn't mind getting hate mail from Cupertino. Johansen has written programs that get around those restrictions: one that would let other companies sell copy-protected songs that play on the iPod, and another that would let other devices play iTunes songs. (The iPod will play MP3 files, which do not have any copy protection, but major labels don't sell music in that format.) Right now, thanks to FairPlay, the songs Apple sells at its iTunes store cannot easily be played on other devices, and copy-protected songs purchased from other sites will not play on the iPod. If you want to be specific - and for legal reasons, he does - Johansen has reverse-engineered FairPlay, the encryption technology Apple ( Charts) uses to make the iPod a closed system. And he's using that knowledge to start a business that is going to drive Steve Jobs crazy. Johansen, now 22 and widely known as "DVD Jon" for his exploits, has also figured out how Apple's iPod-iTunes system works. After the program was posted online, Johansen received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation - and a visit from Norwegian police. That meant the movies could be played on any machine, but also that they could be copied. To fix the problem, he and two hackers he met online wrote a program called DeCSS, which removed the encryption that limits what devices can play the discs.
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"I was fed up with not being able to play a movie the way I wanted to play it," that is, on a PC that ran Linux. When he was 15, Johansen got frustrated when his DVDs didn't work the way he wanted them to.


Sometimes, however, the things Johansen tries to improve were made a certain way for a reason. If you're in the music business, do you want to side with DVD Jon or Steve Jobs?
