Apple’s FairPlay copy-protection system which prevents you from playing muisc downloaded from stores other than iTunes, has been cracked by Jon Lech Johansen, a 22 year-old on the west coast in San Francisco. The same hacker who as a teen cracked the encryption on DVDs, allowing for DVDs to be copied and played back. This was announced by Monique Farantzos, the managing director at DoubleTwist, the company that plans to monetize from this by licensing the code to other businesses.

Cracking the system was made possible through the reverse-engineering of Apple’s FairPlay technology, which will now allow for other companies to play a part in offering iPod users music, movies, and a number content.

Bad news for Apple’s iTunes which currently controls an 88 percent share of the legal music download industry in the United States. It is not clear what Apple will do about this in the long-run, but currently they will continue aiming to keep the music bought from the iTunes store only available for Apple products, and the music bought from other stores other then iTunes will continue not to work on your iPods.

Since the beginning Apple has weighed to much importance on trying to keep others out of they’re iPod + iTunes industry and in turn are fueling the rebel mechanism in other businesses to come along and rival them. They would be better off by simply licensing out the technology themselves, if they aren’t planning on doing it already.

On a lighter note, this could broaden our selection and help companies such as Microsoft Corp., Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which have all announced plans over the past few months for music download services combined with new devices to challenge Apple.