In copyright today we spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the difference between these two classifications. After a few minutes, it occurred to me that the distinction between them is trivial at best.
One student, when asked to explain the difference between an analog and digital camera, said something to the effect that an analog camera stores the “actual” image while the digital camera stories an “approximation” of the actual image.
I don’t buy it.
Film works through a light-sensitive chemical reaction. The difference between the chemical reproduction of an image and the digital reproduction is one of granularity. How much can you enlarge that image until there’s a noticeable degradation in quality. It’s my un-researched belief that currently film is sufficiently granular that the quality bottleneck would be at the lens rather than the film. Digital isn’t far behind.
Moore’s law suggests that digital will eventually overtake analog… but many will ignore the true benchmark in favor of this one: when you blow up a film negative too large, the image becomes blurry. Details are lost in that blur. With digital, you blow it up and see pixels… the quality degradation is more pronounced.
The real difference is not one of medium, though. The reason one has to distinguish between “analog” and “digital” in a copyright class is because of the ease of copying digital works. That has less to do with the distinction and more to do with the nature of the hardware. If every person walked around with a photocopier in their pocket, we’d have had this copyright problem a long time ago.
Tags: Copyright
January 14th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
The main difference between digital and analog, is that digital is a word that is scary enough to fool congress into giving entertainment industry conglomerates carte blanche to rape and pillage sensible copyright law in this country (they even gave it a snappy snappy name, DMCA… its for the digital millenium) and analog is a word that is none of those things.