DoubleTwist wins venture capital backing

A San Francisco start-up that helps Apple iTunes users to circumvent encryption and share their music more easily has won venture capital backing and launched its first products. DoubleTwist has the controversial “DVD Jon” as a co-founder. Jon Lech Johansen, 24, earned notoriety at the age of 15 for co-authoring software that unscrambled encryption on DVDs. He has also, over the past four years, reverse engineered Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management technology used in iTunes. His new venture will announce it has secured funding from Index Ventures, the European venture capital firm that has backed start-ups including Skype, Betfair and last.fm. (Financial Times, Cnet)