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.
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nail against the inevitable end to their various monopolies, media companies reluctantly added support for the already-outdated MP3 format to their players.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)
