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"DVD Jon" Reverse Engineers FairPlay

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the double-twist-of-fate dept.

breun writes to bring us up to date on the doings of Jon Lech Johansen, known as "DVD Jon" after he cracked CSS encryption at the age of 15. As reported by GigaOM's Liz Gannes, Johansen has now reverse-engineered Apple's FairPlay DRM — but not to crack it. Instead Johansen's company, DoubleTwist Ventures, wants to license the tech to media companies shut out by Apple from playing their content on the iPod. And, soon, on the iTV. Johansen could end up selling a lot of hardware for Apple.

5 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ton o Bricks time... by ALpaca2500 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Apple doesn't make a boatload of money on the hardware (why else are they able to effectively price-match other MP3 players), but a huge amount from Itunes.

    You have that completely backwards. Apple's profit margin on the iPod is huge compared to what they're making on iTunes downloads...

  2. For those that didn't RTFM by guruevi · · Score: 5, Informative

    DVD Jon, didn't break the FairPlay, he emulates it with his software. So he's not in violation of DMCA I think. Just like the Samba project reverse-engineered the SMB protocol, they did the same. So he's going to talk to Steve in January and has at least one (1) customer (Microsoft? haha)

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  3. Re:Real already did this by Mr2001 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Everyone who buys content from, e.g., iTunes, knows exactly what the restrictions are. No one is forcing them to buy it.

    Close: they know what the restrictions are right now. They don't know what the restrictions will be tomorrow or next year. Apple has, in fact, issued updates to iTunes to tighten the restrictions on music that had already been purchased, and they may very well do so again in the future.
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  4. Re:*sniff*.. *sniff*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Does nobody remember the landmark Sony vs. Connectix case? A company can reverse engineer proprietary software and implement software that replicates functionality learned from said reverse engineering in their own devices in order to create compatibility between devices.

  5. Re:*sniff*.. *sniff*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Umm, he moved to San Fransisco. Which is in the US, last I heard.

    Idiot.