ABSTRACT
Why buy something for vast sums of money that other people can seemingly have for free? This is one of the puzzles confronting people new to both the art market and the market in NFTs. Both soaring markets depend on a stark division between real and fake, original and copy. Yet in a world of increasingly cheap and limitless copying, why do people still pay so much for authentic originals when you can download or 3D-print identical copies? What is the mysterious mechanism that creates value in a world of unfettered mechanical and digital reproduction?
For years, the mechanism was copyright law, which was created to solve the problem of how to monetize works that could be copied. But the art market, presaging the NFT market, long ago cast aside copyright as the mechanism to create value in a world of copies. Both markets instead depend on a non-legal market mechanism, what I call the ‘norm of authenticity’ …
Adler, Amy M, Artificial Authenticity (September 18, 2022), 98 New York University Law Review, no 3; NYU Law and Economics Research Paper No 23-08; NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No 23-14.
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