On licensing FairPlay and solid business ideas
Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon), the wiz kid who broke the DVD content-scrambling system at age 15, is now working on licensing FairPlay [via] to companies who want their content to play on Apple’s devices. FairPlay is Apple’s version of DRM—which Johansen has reverse-engineered.
RealNetworks first did this with Harmony back in 2004, applying FairPlay to songs you wanted to transfer to your iPod. Apple would break Harmony with every iPod firmware release, revealing the shakiness of the whole effort.
DVD Jon’s company, DoubleTwist Ventures, is hoping to get away with it by using the “our solution generates more hardware sales for Apple” argument. There is a case for this, and it’s certainly true that hardware sales are where the money is at. The question though remains: couldn’t have RealNetworks claimed the same? Yet look what happened to Harmony.
On a similar note, if you represented a media company would you bet heavily on an effort that may evolve into an intense cat-and-mouse game? Assuming each new iPod firmware release kept your products out of the loop (which isn’t extreme, based on what already happened), would you fancy the idea of counting the hours/days/weeks till DVD Jon and his crew reverse-engineer the new Faiplay versions so that you can address your market again? I think not.
Before leaving the site, have a look at our most popular entries:
- Review: FixTunes (September 14, 2006)
- Apple Lossless offerings from the iTMS not likely—for now (June 28, 2006)
- Review: Datasafe oomi (June 7, 2006)
- HOWTO: Move your iTunes music while preserving library data (May 11, 2006)
- Batteries 101 (May 8, 2006)
- Presentation: iPod Hi-Fi, plus a few thoughts (March 2, 2006)
- Presentation/Review: Creative Zen Vision:M (December 9, 2005)
- Review: Alegria Audio Ling bookshelf speaker system (November 9, 2005)
- HOWTO: Put together a $3K audiophile CD player for $555 (October 20, 2005)
- HOWTO: Build the CMoy pocket amplifier (October 16, 2005)
DVD Jon didn’t crack DVD encryption. He was a member of a group with another anonymous member who developed DVD decoding software. DVD Jon got the publicity for it, but had nothing to do with the actual encryption code.
...added by user /// December 28th, 2006 at 13:06 PM