[Leica] Re:digital transformation

[robertmeier at usjet.net (Robert Meier)]

The original manuscript of Henry Miller's The Turn of the Screw would be a 
very valuable manuscript indeed.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian Reid" <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
To: "Leica Users Group" <lug@leica-users.org>
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2005 1:28 PM
Subject: Re: [Leica] Re:digital transformation


>
>> Somewhere, somebody always wanta an original.
>
> In 1978 I was visiting the British Museum. Waiting in line for lunch in 
> the little cafeteria there, I looked in the glass case that they had 
> thoughtfully placed to help us line-waiters forget about the delays. The 
> case contained, primarily, original manuscripts of famous books, including 
> a section of the King James Bible, Henry Miller's The Turn of the Screw, 
> an Edgar Allen Poe story, and a few more that I don't remember.
>
> I was in London taking a break from writing my doctoral dissertation, 
> which was on computerized word processing and document production. At that 
> time I knew that in 25 to 50 years there would no longer be such a thing 
> as an "original" in the world of publication. I daydreamed about what they 
> might have in that showcase in the year 2003, some 25 years in the future. 
> A floppy disk holding a draft of some great book? Laser printer output of 
> a draft of a poem?
>
> The showcase is gone. They couldn't figure out what to put in it, either. 
> By and large the world of printed books has learned to live without the 
> concept of "original manuscript". My guess is that the world of 
> photography will eventually learn it too.
>
> One of the most difficult characteristics of the digital world is that a 
> copy of a digital artifact is indistinguishable from the original. This 
> dilemma has kept Microsoft and Adobe busy for years engineering schemes 
> for sofware activation, so that it's not enough to have a copy of the 
> software, you must also receive electronic permission to use it. That's 
> how they implement the notion of "original".
>
> Since the "original" of a digital image is a bunch of bits, and all visual 
> renderings of it are copies, collectors will have to spend their money on 
> something else. Me, I want Kyle Cassidy to autograph a big print of a 
> portrait of Colleen. She's an original, and his signature would be an 
> original; to heck with the provenance of the print.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>