Two well known digital tech mavericks are teaming up to work on a digital music project code named “Oboe,” which one of them, Michael Robertson, claims will bring “digital music into the 21st century.”
As Wired News reports, Norwegian media hacker Jon Lech Johansen, a.k.a. DVD Jon, has been hired by MP3Tunes, Robertson’s online service that sells music in MP3 format with no DRM. As we noted in a post yesterday, Johansen was recently profiled by the WSJ’s Steve Stecklow.
The fact that Johansen would end up working with Robertson is not too surprising. Robertson’s entire career has been based on advocating open standards and consumer choice, and challenging entrenched incumbents. His first such startup, MP3.com, was one of the web’s first digital music sites. After being sued by the record companies and selling the company to one of them for a healthy profit, Robertson founded Linux-OS provider Linspire (formerly Lindows), followed by SIPphone, which provides VoIP and IM service through the open standard Gizmo Project, and most recently MP3Tunes.
On his web site, Robertson describes Johansen as someone who “doesn’t advocate piracy, but does advocate consumers’ rights to manage their own purchased content” and suggests their shared philosophy was a key factor in Johansen’s decision:
Last Saturday, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page story about Jon relocating to the United States. After that, he got plenty of job offers from some of the biggest names in the technology business. I talked to him over lunch today and asked if he wanted to work at those other companies. “Not really,” he replied in a typical minimalist Scandinavian-style reply, forcing me to ask why not. “I want to work on open systems, which is why I came to you.”
Robertson’s web posting had no details about Oboe, except that it is “a significant new project we have underway that will launch before the end of the year” and that “[i]t’s as momentous as anything I’ve ever done in my technical career.”
The Wired piece includes some comments from Johansen:
“I have no idea what I’ll be doing, but I know it will be reverse engineering, and I’m sure it will be interesting,” Johansen told Wired News during a Friday stopover in San Francisco…”I plan to continue my research, but I won’t be writing any tools (while in the United States).”
As for what kind of research he might pursue, Johansen says he’s intrigued by Helix, the DRM system used by RealNetworks, because “it’s the same audio format as Apple’s, but higher quality.” Real’s music store is only open to U.S. customers, which has been frustrating for Johansen. “Basically, if I have no intention of using a service then I won’t bother reverse-engineering it,” he said. “Now that I can get an American credit card and sign up for their store I might look into it.”
Although he dismissed the idea of being arrested with a shrug, Johansen admitted his stop in San Francisco — 800 miles north of San Diego — was planned in part as an opportunity to consult with attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Wired also summarizes Johansen’s background:
A world-famous reverse engineer by the time he was 16, the soft-spoken tinkerer outraged the motion picture industry in 1999 for his work on DeCSS, a successful project to crack the encryption on DVDs that led to Hollywood’s first lawsuits under the United States’ controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since then, Johansen’s hacks for Apple Computer’s iTunes software and Microsoft’s Media Player have made headlines, and his blog — titled “So Sue Me” — has become must-see surfing for digital media geeks and, one suspects, entertainment company lawyers.
PyMusique, another tool Johansen and two other engineers released earlier this year, allows people with Linux operating systems to buy music from the iTunes store and save it in an unrestricted format.
“I still haven’t heard anything from Apple about my hacks,” he said with an infectious grin. “There is a tool based on my work reverse-engineering Apple’s FairPlay called jhymn that’s been hosted on a U.S. server for over a year and nothing has happened.”
Mitch Shapiro at 1:54 PM|Comments(0)
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