MacRumors.com

Playlistmag.com discusses the efforts of a company called Navio. The company, which specializes in digital-rights managment, has announced plans to reverse engineer Apple's FairPlay Digital Rights Management format that is used to protect songs sold from the iTunes Music Store.

The plan is to allow other online stores to sell FairPlay encoded songs to allow playback on the popular Apple iPod.

Schaaf described Navio as "DRM-agnostic," adding that the company was only providing the technology that its customers are asking for. "Whether it's Helix, WMA or FairPlay, our customers indicate what kind of DRM encoding they want and then we provide them with a solution," he said.

Navio is not the first company to do this. RealNetworks Harmony technology accomplished the same feat, and despite some sparring with Apple, continues to provide iPod compatibility.