doubleTwist: Variations on a theme by DVDJon

10:00 pm, February 25th, 2008, fitterhappier

Mythical beast, adrenaline junkie and sometime digital revolutionary Jon Lech Johansen has fired the latest volley in the DRM wars, launching doubleTwist, software promising to make restrictions on purchased digital media a thing of the past. A grizzled veteran of the campaign against DRM, “DVD Jon” has been handing media companies defeat after defeat, nonchalantly toppling flimsy restriction schemes from DVD copy-protection to Windows Media to FairPlay, the encryption scheme “protecting” most purchases from Apple’s iTunes.

It’s not a great stretch to suggest that Johansen’s work has proved to the corporate world that DRM doesn’t work. Tech news outlets received the news of Jon’s calmly, reporting on the announcement with typical restraint and critical analysis. Oh my dear lord, no, they certainly did no such thing. DVD JON CREATES DRM KILLER, Slashdot reported. (”What, again?” responded thousands of readers the world over.) The truth is that doubleTwist is less a direct assault on DRM, like the Pickett’s Charge of Johansen’s PlayFair endeavor, than a preview of a DRM-free world. Bought your favorite album from iTunes and can’t wait to play it on your flavor of the month mobile phone? doubleTwist, it seems, can make it happen. Make the jump to read how.The twist, such as it is, seems to be the integration with social networking site and bottomless pit FaceBook. Demos on the doubleTwist site show someone sharing music, movies and pictures with friends on FaceBook, all with just a few simple clicks. Instead of having to authorize your friend’s computer or AppleTV just to let her hear the latest track from Beirut, you simply tell doubleTwist to share the track with her through FaceBook, and doubleTwist takes care of the messy particulars. Yes, it’s a brave, new post-DRM world. Or is it? It appears that doubleTwist’s solution to providing a universal music format is to convert your copy-protected files to MP3. In practice, this means conversion from one lossy format — say, Apple’s protected AAC — to another lossy format, unprotected MP3. While you’re not likely to notice much difference listening to the converted tracks on your mobile’s built-in speaker, as soon as you introduce audio equipment of any decent quality, all those concessions to compression are going to take a toll on the sound. doubleTwist pursues interoperability at the expense of quality. Johansen and the doubleTwist team could hardly have done otherwise, of course, but this sort of compromise is the reason why, for all its ease of use and clever integration with FaceBook, doubleTwist is a preview of the digital world free from the shackles of DRM.

doubleTwist is forced to work in an environment polluted by the occasionally clumsy and frequently hostile corporate design decisions that have brought us such famous victories for consumers as Sony’s attempt to copy-protect its music CDs. Over the course of a decade largely spent fighting tooth and nail against the inevitable end to their various monopolies, media companies reluctantly added support for the already-outdated MP3 format to their players. This digital world, a wasteland of decrepit standards analogous to the crumbling US public infrastructure, and not a utopia ringing with the harmonies of millions of shared music files, is the world with which doubleTwist must cope. Which is to say the listening experience is ultimately no better than it was in 1999, when college students with addictive personalities devoted whole terms to their MP3 collections, skipping exam reviews in favor of epic Napster sessions that resulted in the back catalog from Yes.

Of course, there’s another, more pragmatic consideration behind the decision to use MP3 as doubleTwist’s music format of choice. Simply stripping the DRM from one of Apple’s protected AAC tracks is a crowd-pleaser, you bet, but it’s tantamount to streaking at the Super Bowl: sooner or later some hired heavyweight is bound to have a knee on your throat. In contrast, converting all music files to MP3 guarantees origin anonymity, or at least as much anonymity as one can expect on the web. doubleTwist’s success is far from assured, but it’s clearly the first concerted effort to build an alternative to last century’s tottering media empires, incorporating social networks while coping with the lingering realities of digital media. And doubleTwist copes admirably. Or at least I assume it would. There’s as yet no Mac version, and my attempts to get it to install on a virtual machine running Windows XP failed. (doubleTwist logo courtesy of doubletwist.com)