As many of you know, Jon Johansen (or better known as DVD Jon) is at it again – this time with a new company he help to co-found with Monique Farantzos called Doubletwist Ventures. He’s managed to reverse engineer Apple’s FairPlay DRM technology and make it available to a wider selection of devices other than the iPod.

What’s particularly interesting is - Jon isn’t reverse engineering FairPlay to make the content free to everyone. What he’s basically doing is allowing FairPlay protected content to be playable on non-Apple devices while still preserving the copyright protection. Thus as long as you own the music, you’re now given the right to play the music on a wider variety of devices. How will this work? Basically they’re looking to fool iTunes into thinking your MP3 player is actually an iPod device.

On the flip side, Doubletwist Ventures is also working on wrapping non-FairPlay protected content with FairPlay DRM – making such content playable on iPods. There’s plenty of DRM content out there that won’t work on iPods because they use a different set of DRM technologies. With Doubletwist Ventures, this content will now be playable simply because FairPlay will be wrapped around the content and thereby recognized by iTunes.

It’ll be interesting to see how all of this plays out over the next few weeks and months. It’s not entirely clear whether Apple will move to block this from working since Doubletwist doesn’t actually remove any sort of copyright technology from the songs – but you never know.

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