Jon Lech Johansen, the 21-year-old Norwegian media hacker nicknamed DVD Jon, is moving to San Diego to work for maverick tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson in what can only be described as the most portentous team-up since Butch met Sundance.
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.
In a posting to his website late Tuesday, Robertson said he’d snapped up Johansen to work on a "significant new project" called Obeo at his digital music company MP3tunes. Obeo will "bring digital music into the 21st century," Robertson wrote.
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