Restricting Anti-Circumvention Devices

Abstract

Until recently, information was recorded in analog form. Early cave paintings may be the oldest known examples of information recording in analog form. The only way to copy a cave painting was to create another painting, close to the original. This situation continued for a long time until the development of the pantograph, an instrument that allows fairly accurate copying of planar line drawings. The subsequent invention of black and white photography provided the ability to faithfully copy images, beyond those of lines on a planar surface. The ability to produce color photographs extended the domain of images to color. Exceptions notwithstanding, in each of these cases, it was unlikely that a copy would have be mistaken for the original. This was due to the fact that it was virtually impossible to capture the precise value of any element in the original analog image. Further, the original and its copy would generally employ different materials.