Geek Tweaks Disk: Risk Taker? Movie Maker? Law Breaker?

Boing Boing had a link this morning to a Geek with Family post in which the resident geek had a defective rental disc that could only be watched if he broke the law.

Let me back up and let "Geek" himself explain:

Disney’s Atlantis the Lost Empire was one of a few discs at the time that were mastered with bad audio flags (including Pearl Harbor and Jurassic Park 3), that in combination with my Onkyo AV receiver output a few seconds of audio mixed with a few seconds of silence every few seconds.

Disney DVD’s solution was to try a different receiver. Onkyo’s solution was to avoid Dolby Digital and run the DTS track, only available on the $40, non-rentable Atlantis Special Edition 2-disc set. Both of these solutions were unacceptable. I turned to the internet for answers. I found you could re-encode the Dolby Digital track with proper flags with Apple’s DVD Studio Pro. So all I had to do was grab the separate video and audio tracks from the disc, repair the audio and then burn the fixed movie to a DVD-R.

In other words, he had to defeat the Digital Rights Management (DRM) feature of the disc and burn his own (properly encoded) copy in order to watch the movie. This is, technically, a violation of the law, folks.

But can you blame him?

I mean, it's far more effort than I would have gone through - even if I had the equipment and wherewithal to do what he did - but if a company puts out a product that doesn't do what it's supposed to do and you have the ability to "hack" it, tweak it or otherwise manipulate it so that it performs as promised... shouldn't you be allowed to do that?

Here's what the geek says:

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.

Now, this story is slightly complicated by the fact that the geek's disc was a rental.

But, presumably, the disc was returned in pristine form, so no harm, no foul there, as far as I'm concerned. Unless, of course, he kept the copy he burned and didn't destroy it... in which case, it's a clear violation of the law.

This scenario, by the way, is altogether different from what firms like CleanFlicks do, which is edit movies on DVD to remove offensive content, thereby making it into a completely different film than the one the director and other creative artists intended it to be.

And that's a whole other - controversial - kettle of fish.

[Previously: The Slashin' of the Christ]