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 andĪs 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
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 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 otherĭevices 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.) 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
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
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 That meant the moviesĬould 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.
"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 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?