The Norwegian computer programmer, whose real name is Jon Lech Johansen, made headlines as a teenager when he cracked the motion picture industry’s DVD encryption. Now he has a new company dedicated to providing an easier way for sharing content among friends.

Founded with Monique Farantzos in 2007, San Francisco-based doubleTwist is about sharing and syncing content across multiple devices, like mobile phones, gaming platforms, music players and TV boxes.

“The digital media landscape has become a tower of Babel, alienating and frustrating consumers,” doubleTwist co-founder Farantzos said. “Our goal is to provide a simple and well integrated solution that the average consumer can use to eliminate the headaches associated with their expanding digital universe.”

Along with sharing content as well as syncing it with friends’ mobile devices, doubleTwist is getting a lot of attention for its file conversion abilities, namely the ability to convert songs purchased from iTunes and protected by Apple’s proprietary FairPlay digital rights management technology, into unprotected MP3s.

Although some headlines maintain that doubleTwist has cracked Apple’s DRM technology, a closer look indicates otherwise. Reuters reports that doubleTwist merely automates what many iTunes users are already doing.

Ever since the iTunes Music Store opened for business, customers have burned tracks purchased from the online music store to blank CDs, and then re-ripped the CDs back to their computer hard drives. This procedure results in DRM-less copies of the original music purchased from iTunes, although there is some loss of audio quality.

With doubleTwist, the technique is somewhat similar, but the company has cut out the CD burning procedure. Reuters reports that doubleTwist plays the original track in fast-forward mode, and makes a copy of the resulting output, then stores that copy as an MP3. And yes, there is some loss of quality. A five percent loss, according to Reuters.

The founders have made it clear that doubleTwist isn’t for massive filesharing. Instead, they point out that their new service is for sharing content among friends. The current release is a beta version and works on computers running Windows XP and Vista. Expect a Mac OS version sometime during the second quarter.