GROWING UP in a small town in southern Norway, Jon Lech Johansen loved to take things apart to figure out how they worked.

When he was 14, his father bought a digital camera that came with bug-ridden software. Johansen analysed the code and wrote a program that worked better.

When he bought an early MP3 player that kept crashing, he studied how it worked, wrote a more reliable program, and posted it on the internet so other people could download it free.

Later, the company that made the device asked him about writing a new version, but he didn’t hear back after he sent in his résumé. “I assume it had something to do with my age,” said Johansen. He was 17.

Sometimes, however, the things Johansen tries to improve were made a certain way for a reason. When he was 15, he got frustrated when his DVDs didn’t work the way he wanted them to.

“I was fed up with not being able to play a movie the way I wanted to play it” — that is, on a PC that ran Linux.

To fix the problem, he and two hackers he met online wrote a program called DeCSS, which removed the encryption that controls what devices can play the discs. That meant the movies could be played on any machine, but also that they could be copied. After the program was posted online, Johansen received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation — and a visit from Norwegian police.

Johansen, now 22 and widely known as “DVD Jon” for his exploits, has also figured out how Apple’s iPod-iTunes system works. And he is using that knowledge to start a business that is going to drive Apple boss Steve Jobs crazy.

To be specific, Johansen has reverse-engineered Fair Play, the encryption technology Apple uses to make the iPod a closed system.

Right now, thanks to Fair Play, the songs that Apple sells at its iTunes store cannot easily be played on other devices, and copy-protected songs purchased from other sites will not play on the iPod. (The iPod will play MP3 files, which do not have any copy protection, but major labels don’t sell music in that format.) Johansen has written programs that get around those restrictions — one that would let other companies sell copy-protected songs that play on the iPod, and another that would let other devices play iTunes songs.

Soon his new company, Double Twist, will license them to anyone who wants to get into the digital-music business.

“Today’s reality is that there’s this iTunes-iPod ecosystem that excludes everyone else from the market,” said Johansen. “I don’t like closed systems.”

For his role in writing DeCSS, Johansen was charged with breaking the Norwegian law that prohibits gaining unauthorised access to data, but he was acquitted twice when courts ruled the data were his own. The movie studios didn’t like that decision, which almost certainly would have been different in America, where the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits circumventing digital-rights- management technology (DRM) for any reason. The movie studios used that law to sue a hacker magazine called 2600 that linked to DeCSS on its website.

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