Michael Robertson, founder of the original MP3.com and one of the pioneers of the digital music revolution, has got something big brewing, and he's brought DVD Jon all the way from Norway to work on it.

Robertson currently runs San Diego-based startup MP3tunes.com, an online digital music store that sells MP3s and eschews the digital rights management (DRM) copy-protection technology used by all of the label-supported digital music services.

As a result, MP3tunes has been unable to convince any of the major record labels to sign on to the service, leaving it with a catalogue of around 300,000 songs from independent and unsigned artists.

But now Robertson says he wants to take the company to the next level and "bring digital music into the 21st century," according to the latest entry in his blog.

To do so, MP3Tunes is in the midst of a project called Oboe, about which Robertson won't say much other than that "it's as momentous as anything I've ever done in my technical career, but I won't say more since I despise vaporware."

Obeo will launch before the end of the year, Robertson wrote.

The project is big enough to warrant hiring Jon Lech Johansen, one of the most well-known software engineers on the planet, largely thanks to his creation in 1999 of DeCSS, which cracked the encryption on DVDs and thus earned him the nickname DVD Jon.

The movie industry convinced Norwegian police to arrest and charge Johansen for violating that country's computer crime laws, but he was acquitted--twice.

Johansen has since created software to allow people to circumvent the FairPlay DRM of Apple's iTunes store and Microsoft's Media Player.

Robertson has also faced the wrath of the entertainment industry.

In 2000, the major record labels sued MP3.com, the site he founded in 1997, for its my.mp3.com service, a virtual digital music locker that allowed users unlimited streaming access to their music stored on the company's servers.

But MP3.com hadn't obtained licenses from the labels for the service, and later that year, MP3.com was found guilty of copyright infringement in a federal court.

Over the course of several months, the company settled its suits with four of the five major labels as well as with music publishers and eventually secured licenses from four of the labels and the music publishers for more than $110 million.

But Universal Music Group held out, eventually getting $118 million in damages from the company and later buying the embattled firm in 2001 for $372 million.

CNET Networks bought the assets of MP3.com from Vivendi Universal in November, 2003.

With his new fledgling music company looking to break out, Robertson immediately offered Johansen a job when he heard he was looking to move to the US.

"I knew he'd be a great fit for the team, so I quickly extended him a job offer," he wrote. "It took a few months to process the immigration paperwork, but now he's living in San Diego and working on Oboe."

"He's going to like Oboe and so will you. Stay tuned," Robertson wrote.