DoubleTwist: Licensing FairPlay (Apple iTunes DRM)

CNN has posted a follow-up to the previous news that Jon Lech Johansen ("DVD Jon") had reverse engineered Apple's FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) format.

Johansen has formed a company called DoubleTwist to license the format to other companies interested in providing DRM protected files that are playable on Apple's iPod. Apple has not allowed other companies to license FairPlay, effectively blocking most companies from selling DRM protected songs that can play on the iPod.

The article states that "an unnamed client will soon use the technology so its copy-protected content will be playable on iPods". Details are not available yet.

DVD Jon had previously circumvented FairPlay's DRM in 2003, and since then multiple other tools have appeared to provide similar functionality for updated versions of Quicktime/iTunes. Jon is also credited for developing an algorithm named deCSS to strip a DVD of its encryption (called Content Scramble System, or CSS), hence his nickname.