FairPlay for sale, and not by Apple
You may know Jon Lech Johansen as 'DVD Jon,' a name he acquired after he wrote DeCSS, which unscrambles the content on DVDs to make copying possible. He isn't a fan of DRM, as you can imagine, and has set his sights on Apple in the past. He has reverse engineered a previous version ofFairPlay, Apple's propriety DRM that comes along (for free!) on any item purchased from the iTunes Store. The iPod is the only device that is officially capable of playing FairPlay DRM'ed files, and the iTunes Store is the only store that sells FairPlay tracks and movies.
That is, until now. It seems that Jon wants to license his version of FairPlay to any company that might want to have their content play securely on an iPod. Now, he doesn't seem to think that this is illegal since he hasn't reverse engineered FairPlay. Instead, he created something new that acts just like it. I wonder what Apple legal will think of that.
