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[dvd-discuss] Digital is different?



Well, maybe it is, but it certainly isn't *new*.
I was recently reminded that the terrifying prospect of
"infinite perfect digital copies" was actually debated
almost 2000 years ago, by people with a bit more at stake
than Hollywood.

Background: according to Jewish tradition, when Moses received
the Torah at Sinai, he received both the written Law (the books)
but also the Oral Law (the proper interpretation of it.)  This
duality, by the way, is also built into the US Judicial system
by the combination of statutory and case law, so every judge in
the country understands the point.

For more than a thousand years, the written Law as carefully
preserved ("perfect digital copies") with such fidelity that
archaeologists have found virtually the same text over millennia.
The Oral, Law, on the other hand, was passed from teacher to
student and adapted for each generation.

All that changed in the Second Century.  Following Bar Kochba's
revolt, the Romans set out to exterminate Judaism.  Not
surprisingly for the Romans, they were both quite thorough and
ruthless enough to make a Nazi wince.  In the face of this
threat, Jewish scholars faced the possibility that the Oral
Law might be lost due to loss of the wetware holding it.

Rabbi Judah the Prince took the big step and recorded the
Oral Law in written form and opening it up to "infinite
digitally perfect copies."  It's hard to understate the
stakes here: on the one hand you have the fear of extinction
and on the other a break with a tradition that was established
by Moses (or his Boss, for that matter.)  In the end, it was
the "public domain" that won the day, and from that day to
this the Mishnah of Judah Ha-Nasi has been copied in nearly
every country on Earth with remarkable fidelity.

What's changed is not "digital reproduction" but the cost
of doing so, and even that's not new.  Judah Ha-Nasi lived
in the age of scribes, but the texts he redacted were among
the first reproduced by printing press, which was notable
mainly for its ability to make error-free copies cheaply.

The ability of the printing press to make "infinite perfect
digital copies" so impressed the Founders that they addressed
the matter in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Notably, they chose *not* to insist on either mechanical or
prior restraint of those presses.

-- 
| It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance  |
|  It's the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance  |
|   It's the one who won't be taken who cannot seem to give     |
|    and the soul afraid of dyin' that never learns to live     |
+------------- D. C. Sessions <dcs@lumbercartel.com> -----------+