[via Engadget]
For the non-geeks in the house, Jon Johansen is the man who cracked the encryption for DVD's, and also authored a tool (QTFairUse) which stripped out the FairPlay encryption from iTunes files.
Now he's started a company, Double Twist Ventures in Steve Job's backyard (give or take the 40 miles between San Francisco and Cupertino). The firm will license technology that allows companies to encode files with FairPlay DRM, so they can be played on everyone's favorite digital music player, the iPod.
RealNetworks tried to introduce a similiar technology called Harmony, which resulted in a tit-for-tat situation where Apple patched iTunes to break Harmony. DVD Jon may have all sorts of hacker cred but it seems doubtful that any solution will be guaranteed to work with Apple's FairPlay until the firm actually licenses it to other companies, set to happen some day after Bill O'Reilly kicks a freestyle verse on a Ludacris track.
If you're confused as to why someone so identified with circumventing copy protections now tries to commercialize a product that, while somewhat shady in terms of implementation, upholds the DRM mess, join the club. A group called Defective by Design feels your pain and has declared October 3rd a "Day Against DRM". They have a petition you can sign to send to humanitarian Bono of "We have our own iPod Edition" U2 fame, which is either really ironic or entirely appropriate.
I'm going to go buy Rage's "Killing in the Name" on iTunes right now to see if the contradictory forces can make my head explode.