According to the French paper Le Canard Enchaine (The Chained Duck), the president fancied himself in a documentary called 'A visage decouvert : Nicolas Sarkozy', done by Galaxie Presse, and wanted to give copies of it to fellow diplomats attending a conference.
But things went pear shaped when the distributor sent him only 50 copies, not enough to go around.
In atypical French fashion, Sarkozy refused to surrender and instead enlisted the help of the presidential AV club, the Service audiovisuel de la presidence de la Republique, to burn off a few hundred copies for him to dish out.
Unfortunately it slipped his mind to get permission from the publisher first.
In true DVD pirate manner they apparently even rejigged the cover, removing the studio's logo and replacing it with their own, but stopped short of photoshopping Sarkozy's head onto the bare chested torso of Vladimir Putin.
For his sake, we hope Sarkozy's own three-strikes policy for illegal filesharing of copyrighted works is applied per case rather than per disc.