Peter Griffin: If only the animals spoke the same lingo

He's 22, Norwegian and he's done something that will appeal to thousands of New Zealand iPod users denied access to the iTunes.com online music store: he's hacked the iPod so it can be used with other music stores.

Jon Lech Jahnsen has a history of blowing open the copy-protection technologies that are built into many of our electronic devices to prevent piracy. As a teenager, he bypassed the encryption on DVDs, a move that saw him dragged into court. He was later acquitted.

Since 2003, Jahnsen has made available software that allows users to bypass the Fairplay digital rights management software with which iPod maker Apple encodes all music downloaded from its iTunes store.

The software has been difficult to use, designed with other geeks in mind. Now Jahnsen intends to make his copyright protection work-around mainstream and has started a company, DoubleTwist Ventures, to sell the software to music download providers and music player makers.

He can expect a fairly powerful legal salvo from Apple, which has so far been merciless in pursuing any company that's tried to tinker with its dream music model. Apple managed to fend off a similar attempt by Real Player to make the iPod compatible with its Harmony music download service. The legal fight is likely to be of Napster proportions, unless Jahnsen has also figured out a legal work-around. Even then, he may not have the financial power to handle legal action.

Currently, Apple's iPod exists in a highly successful and user-friendly but locked-down environment that links every player with the iTunes media and, for those who want to purchase digital music, with the iTunes store.

Fairplay ensures that you can play the downloaded music only on an iPod, and you can play the downloaded music on up to five other computers. Apple has an estimated 85 per cent of the market for legal music downloads - a monopoly in anyone's language. The closed system is pretty seamless, but there's only one supplier and one device: the Apple way or the highway.

Apple's competitors, both music player makers and music download providers, have been unable to break the iPod-iTunes spell. Jahnsen wants to enable songs to be downloaded from music websites other than iTunes to be played on the iPod. He also wants to make iTunes compatible with other music players.

"When you buy a DVD, you know that the DVD will play on your Toshiba or Sony or Philips player, but when you buy music or video online, you don't have that. It is kind of like the zoo: every animal is singing a different tune. We hope to make sense of that, and we have developed a technology to enable that," is how he put it to CNet news.

Jahnsen claims he's not removing Apple's Fairplay copyright protection, just adding the ability for it to be wrapped around music from other sources. It's likely that this will be the crux of the legal argument.

But would his technology loosen Apple's hold, were he able to commercialise it? Almost certainly. Apple has some respectable competitors among music download providers, but none of them have been able to gain access to the iPod. Creative, Sony, Philips, Toshiba, Cowon and a host of other manufacturers also fight it out for 20 per cent of the market because they cannot compete with the iPod-iTunes combo. Opening up the system will ultimately see iPod users drift to download services offering more competitive deals on music and to people choosing iPod rivals.

Jahnsen's attempts to crack open the iPod has particular relevance here in New Zealand, where the iTunes.com store is inaccessible for reasons that have never been properly explained by Apple or by the music industry. But at least 60 per cent of the music players on the market are iPods. This means that users of local download services like CokeTunes, Digirama and Amplifier can't directly transfer songs to their iPods. Without access to the iTunes store, iTunes is fairly useless here. Being able to download music straight to iPods would be a huge advantage.

I agree with Jahnsen that a lack of flexibility in music download services leads to people buying pirated and unprotected music. I hope Jahnsen's innovative plan comes to fruition, though I suspect his powerful rival will win the day - once again.