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What's to stop someone from making a painting that's practically identical to Mona Lisa and selling it for 1/10th the cost?
by RexetBlell 9y ago
What's to stop someone from making a painting that's practically identical to Mona Lisa and selling it for 1/10th the cost?
- paulsutter 9y agoThe Mona Lisa isn’t yet a digital good. But in time it will be possible to make perfect copies, and that raises all sorts of interesting questions.
- baddox 9y agoIf by “perfect copy” you mean a physical copy that cannot be distinguished in a blind testfrom the original in any way, then of course we don’t yet have that capability. Perhaps with advanced scanning and 3D printing that would be possible, but I suspect the true original would still maintain higher value as long as a trustworthy chain of custody was maintained. As soon as a thief removes the original long enough to potentially swap it with a perfect copy, the market value of any alleged original would likely vanish.
- baddox 9y agoNothing, if you’re permitted to make copies of the source of the reproduction (e.g. you went to The Louvre and took a photograph). I would have said that you likely can’t legally print or sell an image of the Mona Lisa you find on Google Images, but Wikipedia says: > The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain". Anyway, reproductions of public domain paintings are commonly produced and sold for far less than the market value of the original.