Via Boing Boing, we saw this account over at Geek With Family that rather nicely captures the absurdity of DRM legislation.

Noticing that a copy of a DVD he owned — Disney’s Atlantis — wouldn’t play on his system in Dolby Surround due to a bug, the author decided to rip the DVD to his computer, crack the DRM and burn it to a DVD-R to solve the problem. Of course, it worked like a charm. Meanwhile, Disney’s solution was to buy another copy of the DVD without the bug, effectively giving them more money for their screw up.

Geek With Family sums up the experience:

My $4 should have gone down the drain with this defective disc. But, through many hours of my valuable time and many expensive software and hardware resources, I was able to enjoy a very mediocre animated feature from Disney’s catalog.

Large corporations screw up and they don’t like to publicize it. Personal DIY can fix these screw ups. Part of this DIY process, defeating DVD’s DRM protection, was criminal. I don’t feel like what I did was theft. I just wanted to watch the movie I paid for.

Real Life DRM Problems: Atlantis the Lost Empire DVD [Geek With Family]

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