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Posted by Rick on 10/27/06 05:22
Talented 22 year old half Polish / half Norwegian smart ass, but
extremely talented computer hacker Jon Lech Johansen (who currently
resides in California), doesn't care less if people know his real
name. He found a way at 15, to successfully hack the encryption
DVD's use (thus allowing them to be copied) has managed to tick
Apple off (despite having had lunch with Mr. Jobs), by successfully
hacking into iPod's FairPlay encryption technology making iPods a
closed system, despite risking a lawsuit, which he couldn't care less
about. Using his hack, users can play more than just iTunes purchased
songs on their iPod and so that iTunes songs can be played on other
hardware devices.
If you want to keep abreast of other cool, new hacking developments Mr.
Johansen comes up with, or ask him any tough questions
relating to successful hacking, the link to his So Sue Me blog is :
http://nanocrew.net/
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391726/index.htm
Unlocking the iPod.
Jon Johansen became a geek hero by breaking the DVD code. Now he's
liberating iTunes - whether Apple likes it or not.
By Robert Levine, Fortune. October 23 2006.
(Fortune Magazine) -- Growing up in a small town in southern Norway,
Jon Lech Johansen loved to take things apart to figure out how they
worked. Unlike most kids, though, he'd put them back together better
than they were before. When he was 14, his father bought a digital
camera that came with buggy software, so Jon analysed the code and
wrote a program that worked better. When Johansen bought an early
MP3 player that kept crashing, he studied how it worked, wrote a more
reliable program, and posted it on the Internet so other people could
download it for free. Later, the company that made the device asked him
about writing a new version, but he didn't hear back after he sent in
his résumé. "I assume it had something to do with my age," Johansen
says dryly. He was 17.
Sometimes, however, the things Johansen tries to improve were made a
certain way for a reason. When he was 15, Johansen got frustrated when
his DVDs didn't work the way he wanted them to. "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. 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. That meant the movies could be
played on any machine, but also that they could be copied. After the
program was posted online, Johansen received an award from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation - and a visit from Norwegian police.
Johansen, now 22 and widely known as 'DVD Jon' for his exploits,
has also figured out how Apple's iPod-iTunes system works. And he's
using that knowledge to start a business that is going to drive Steve
Jobs crazy.
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. Right 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 iPod. (The iPod will play MP3 files, which
do not have any copy protection, but major labels don't sell music in
that format.) 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 other devices
play iTunes songs. 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 hate mail from Cupertino. 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 and co-founder Monique
Farantzos. As 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 Jobs gave the
Wall Street Journal in 2002: "If you legally acquire music, you need to
have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own." As
Johansen sees it, Jobs didn't follow through on this promise, so it's
up to him to fix the system, just as he fixed the software for his
father's camera.
"Today's reality is that there's this iTunes-iPod ecosystem that
excludes everyone else from the market," says Johansen. "I don't like
closed systems." Companies that rely on closed systems don't much
care for him, either. For his role in writing DeCSS, Johansen was
charged with breaking the Norwegian law that prohibits gaining
unauthorized access to data, then was acquitted twice when courts ruled
the data were his own. The movie studios didn't like that decision,
which almost certainly would have been different in the U.S., where the
1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA, for short) prohibits
circumventing digital-rights-management technology (or DRM) for any
reason. The movie studios used that law to successfully sue a hacker
magazine called 2600 that linked to DeCSS on its Web site. Johansen,
who had left high school at 16 to become a programmer, testified in the
2600 case and became frustrated that companies could prohibit customers
from using a product the way they wanted. "I really became interested
in these issues," he says. He also became something of an icon to
hard-core geeks: When Johansen announced on his blog that he was
selling the old iPod he had used to break FairPlay, a Berkeley
researcher bought it to keep as a souvenir. "We all talk about
disruptive forces in business," says Mike McGuire, an analyst at the
Gartner Group. "This guy is a disruptive force unto himself."
There's an obvious question: Isn't opening the iTunes system illegal?
There is no obvious answer. FairPlay is not patented, most likely
because the encryption algorithms it uses are in the public domain.
(Apple would not comment for this story.) And Johansen says he is
abiding by the letter of the law - if not, perhaps, it's spirit.
To let other sites sell music that plays on the iPod, his program will
"wrap" songs with code that functions much like FairPlay. "So we'll
actually add copy protection," he says, whereas the DMCA prohibits
removing it. Helping other devices play iTunes songs could be harder to
justify legally, but he cites the DMCA clause that permits users, in
some circumstances, to reverse-engineer programs to ensure
"interoperability." "The law protects copyrights," he says, "but it
doesn't keep you locked into the iPod." Johansen isn't the only one who
feels that way - or the only one who has found a way around FairPlay.
In 2004, RealNetworks (Charts) released a program called Harmony that
would allow songs from its RealPlayer Music Store to play on the iPod.
Steve Jobs memorably accused the company of using "the ethics and
tactics of a hacker" and threatened to sue. Instead, Apple released
a software update that made Harmony ineffective - although Real
subsequently fixed that. Another company, Navio Systems, has announced
that it has developed a way to play iTunes songs on other devices.
Several more programs on the Internet will strip the FairPlay
encryption from a file, but none of them has a large following.
And not everyone who wants to open up the iPod is a hacker. There have
been demonstrations in the streets of France over Apple's DRM, and
lawmakers there have attempted to require Apple to license FairPlay.
Apple said that such a move would be "state-sponsored piracy." In
the U.S., courts have traditionally allowed inventors to
reverse-engineer products to determine how they function. But the DMCA
allows programmers to do that only in certain cases. "What he's working
on is clearly in the spirit of the reverse-engineering the courts have
been most friendly toward," says Fred von Lohman, a senior staff
attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has informally given
Johansen advice. "But the law is untested, and the case is
complicated."
Since the DMCA was passed, the most relevant legal precedent is a case
in which the videogame maker Blizzard sued an ISP that hosted an
unapproved server where people could play its games, which the court
found to be a DMCA violation. "On the surface, Apple would have a
good case," especially when it comes to making iTunes songs play on
other devices, says Robert Becker, an attorney at Manatt Phelps &
Phillips who has represented the copy-protection company Macrovision.
"Apple would say you're buying music under certain restrictions."
Indeed, how you feel about what Johansen is doing may depend on how you
feel about a question that will become more important as the media
business gradually embraces digital distribution: What exactly are you
buying when you purchase a song on iTunes? An unscientific survey of
friends generated only one answer: a song. An attorney, though, might
say that you are buying a license to play a song on a specific set of
devices - and that using Johansen's software violates Apple's user
agreement (the one you didn't bother to read when you signed up for
iTunes). If the distinction seems minute, suppose you replace your
iPod with another digital music player; unless you convert them to
MP3s, your songs from iTunes will be as useful as eight-track tapes.
For a man so intent on changing the way music is sold, Johansen isn't a
big fan himself. "I've probably bought ten CDs in my whole life," he
says. Much of the music he does have - mainly techno - he buys from
iTunes. When the store went online, it didn't accept foreign credit
cards, so Johansen bought iTunes gift certificates on eBay. Instead
of going to concerts, Johansen bakes. His blog, "So Sue Me," features
dessert recipes along with news about technology and arguments about
copyright law. When DoubleTwist signed its first client - which
Johansen declines to identify - he made an apple pie to celebrate.
Johansen has a soft-spoken modesty that belies his stature as a hacker.
He was among the first to crack FairPlay - he did it for fun on a
vacation in France - and he has also broken a Microsoft code. "If
reverse-engineering were a sport," says Michael Robertson, the Internet
entrepreneur for whom Johansen worked before setting up DoubleTwist,
"Jon would be on the all-star team." Johansen realizes that taking on
Apple could make figuring out FairPlay look easy. But he seems to
regard the fact that he could get sued as one of those complicating
factors an engineer must deal with, and he keeps the
reverse-engineering clause of the DMCA near his desk for easy
reference. "We don't want to go to court, because it's a waste of time
and money," he says. "But if it comes to that, we will test these
issues in court."
Johansen's legal arguments involve the rights of consumers, but opening
the iPod could also be good for the music business. The major labels
worry that compatibility concerns will slow the digital-music market,
especially when Microsoft (Charts) comes out with its own closed system
this Christmas. Chafing at Apple's one-price-fits-all policy, they
would love to see more retailers enter the market. But it says
something about the power of Apple that none provided an executive who
would speak for the record. It is anyone's guess how Apple will react
- the company hasn't contacted DoubleTwist. (Johansen says he had lunch
with Jobs last January, but he hadn't yet started his company.) So
far, Apple hasn't sued anyone who has created or distributed any of the
FairPlay hacks. That could be because the company is afraid that losing
a case would set a precedent that would encourage imitations of the
iPod. Or it could be that Apple doesn't want to give anyone the
publicity. Whatever Apple does, Johansen could have a hard time
making DoubleTwist into a viable business. Companies could be reluctant
to license Johansen's software for fear of being sued along with
DoubleTwist. And they might have a tough time convincing the major
labels to let them sell their music, since the labels know how much
that would upset Apple. "There has to be an agreement between the
label and the retailer," says Josh Wattles, an attorney at Dreier and a
former corporate counsel at Paramount Pictures. "What's the likelihood
of a record company granting that?" Whether or not Johansen makes any
money with DoubleTwist, he will almost certainly make his point. "The
iTunes music store was getting so popular, and I was kind of fed up
that people were accepting that DRM." On the other hand, if Apple
gets fed up with him, he'll end up making his point in a courtroom.
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