Analog Hole - Engineering Vs. Business and Political Views

Engineering Vs. Business and Political Views

The notion of "plugging the analog hole" may be based on fundamental misconceptions of the meaning of analog and digital. There is a history of business and political desires combined with core misunderstandings of technology leading to legislation and industry practices that are counterproductive or fundamentally flawed on an engineering theory level.

One example was an early law passed by the European Parliament to support DRM in response to widespread buzz about unauthorized digital music downloads being held in computer memory caches. Apparently reasoning by analogy to "caches of arms," the use of computer memory caches was outlawed. The legislators, hearing a very general piece of computer jargon (caching) associated with infringement, banned it, not realizing it was a basic digital storage technique found in most modern equipment. A BBC article describing the controversy itself demonstrates the difficulty of explaining to legislators and the general public the aspect that every computer and most digital devices of any kind would have to be destroyed were the law to be evenly enforced. Far from a specialized illegality, caching is a universally used computer memory technique, leading to comparisons of this law to the Indiana Pi Bill.

A body of opinion in the engineering community puts the buzz about the "analog hole" in the same category: an impossible strategy based on fundamental misunderstandings by people who are not engineers that will not solve the stated problem but cause expense and confusion. Both "analog to digital" and "digital to analog" conversion are such basic technologies, with so many possible implementations, that the idea of being able to block conversion by these means is unrealistic. Engineers are aware of mathematical and physical principles that often begin with "It is not possible to..." which sometimes come in direct conflict with business and political goals. One does not have to be an engineer to understand that it is simply not possible to simultaneously display and conceal a signal. In particular, an audio signal must be converted to analog before it reaches the listener.

In addition to this general principle, theory says that digital watermarking and other restrictions on the "analog hole" can be simply defeated by a variety of well-known techniques, such as dithering.

(Digital watermarking is not a preventative measure in itself; to successfully prevent a re-digitising of the content, the watermark must be recognised by the encoding system and then trigger a failure of same. Dithering and other such techniques achieve defeat of this mechanism by obfuscation or removal of the watermark. However, the presence of the watermark, if it survives the copying process, may be used to prove unlawful copying, and may thus serve as a deterrent.)