Thanks to the work of a notorious hacker, iPod users may soon be able to play music downloaded from other companies onto their iPods. Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old who gained fame as a teen when he cracked the encryption on DVDs, has hacked into Apple’s FairPlay copy-protection technology. Johansen and his company, DoubleTwist, plan to license the code to businesses, which will allow them to package content for the iPod that otherwise wouldn’t be compatible. “What he did was basically reverse-engineer FairPlay,” DoubleTwist’s managing director, Monique Farantzos, told Reuters. “This allows other companies to offer content for the iPod.”
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