“DRM-buster DVD Jon has a new target in his sights, and it’s a big piece of fruit. He has reverse-engineered Apple’s Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple’s devices. Instead of breaking the DRM (something he’s already done), Jon has replicated it, and wants to license the technology to companies that want their content (music, movies, whatever) to play on Apple devices. This may not be good news for iTunes the store, but it could make the iPod even more popular,” Liz Gannes reports for GigaOM.

“Jon Lech Johansen became famous for hacking encrypted DVDs so they would play in Linux when he was 15, making him the target of criminal charges for which he was eventually acquitted,” Gannes reports. “Twenty-two-year-old Johansen moved to San Francisco to work with Monique Farantzos, who had contacted him after reading a Wall Street Journal profile of him last fall. The two now live in the Mission District and devote their time to DoubleTwist Ventures, which is Johansen’s first major attempt at commercializing his hacking.”

DVD Jon “has a lot of chutzpah, and related the story of how he emailed Steve Jobs and set up a lunch meeting in January,” Gannes reports. “Johansen and Farantzos went down to Cupertino for an audience with King Jobs, but weren’t terribly specific about their new company’s plans (to be fair, at this point, they didn’t quite know what their plans were). Jobs apparently warned that while Apple was not a litigious company, other tech firms might not take kindly to whatever DVD Jon might be up to. Ha!”

“This is a different twist on the constant battle between DRM crackers and builders (see, just last week, Microsoft’s lawsuit against a hacker for releasing an app that strips off its PlaysForSure DRM). If successful, DoubleTwist will eliminate Apple as a middleman to its own hardware. But in doing so, it just might help Apple sell more of that hardware. Apple enjoys fat margins on its devices, and perhaps should turn a blind eye, for now,” Gannes reports.

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers "ndelc" and "hedgehogfrenzy" for the heads up.]
Yes, Steve Jobs will surely want FairPlay licensing profits to go to DVD Jon instead of Apple. Apple shareholders will want that to happen, too. It makes all the sense in the world.

Related MacDailyNews articles:
DVD Jon hacks Microsoft Windows Media Player file encryption – September 02, 2005
Resurrection Day comes quickly for PyMusique – March 22, 2005
The day the PyMusique died; Apple kills DVD Jon’s iTunes Music Store hack – March 21, 2005
‘PyMusique’ lets users buy songs without DRM from Apple’s iTunes Music Store – March 18, 2005