Years ago I worked in a recording studio and one of the older guys who worked there explained to me about and effect known as the noise wall or barrier. Basically what he was telling me was my eventually you couldn't make an acceptable copy of an analog recording after a number of generations ( a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and so on...) because each time you recorded you added background noise and eventually the background noise overwhelms the original signal. He told me the noise barrier will never be broken.
And as always when someone makes a pronouncement that basically sez Man can't change something (Like Fly or go to the moon etc.) Someone takes up the challenge and whamo that old Barrier all the flat earthers put their faith in is destroyed forever.
The digital Revolution is aptly named because it changed the world so fundamentally (yet subtly) that we could have had a magnetic pole shift and such would not have one tenth of the massive change such has wrought on our world. To be more precise digital did not break the "noise barrier" and noise barrier applies to all things copyable including hard copy text. (ever see a tenth generation copy of a printed document? There is "noise" all over the page in the form of black marks and dots and such) What digital did was just go around the "noise barrier". Digital changed information (be it text, music, pictures or movies)into ones and zeros and as such we basically get a nearly flawless copy each time because we use the original code of ones and zeros when we make a new copy.
The Big Media made a business plan based on analog. Now instead of adapting to the digital world and while allowing people to retain property rights to media goods they purchase yet protect their copyrights too. Big Media wants to make Digital Media Un-ownable by the consumer. Meaning you will have no rights to media once you pay for it. You can't sell it, trade it, or loan it and if they have their way you will only be able to play it on one device and if you get a new device you will need to re-buy all your media again.
They are trying to force this crap through congress by filling campaign coffers to overflowing. Literally Hundreds of TRILLIONS (that is Trillion with a "T") are at stake here. I am afraid its BOHICA time folks they will get this through in dribs and drabs until they sew up DIgital NO-rights and retain their strangle hold on Media!
As of the early 2000's the USPS was still banning Hectographic Reproductions from the mail.
There are "historians" who still attempt to justify the ban on the grounds that it was made to protect sodbusters in the MidWest from fraudulent land brokers.
Actually, the ban was to make it lawful to arrest any Abolitionist caught with copies of Abolitionist literature in the South who might have been distributing such news to slaves.
We see the same forces at work in this attempt to "ban" digital materials ~ first, it's to protect people from being fooled by "fake stuff" (news, politics, copies of copyrighted materials), and then to "protect American industry" (slavery, plantations, music producers, movie producers).
These guys don't even change their story line, and then there are the politicians supporting it ~ same old same old.
I think the requirement here has to be that if you use DIGITAL MEDIA you must arrange your own methods for protection ~ that NO ONE CAN HELP YOU and particularly NOT THE GOVERNMENT. When it comes to DIGITAL the term "copy" is meaningless.