INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND THE MANUFACTURE OF AURA

In his famous 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin noted that the foundation of an artistic work's authenticity and also much of its aesthetic power reside in a particular physical embodiment understood as original. This unique attribute of the art object, this halo of preciousness that marks it as authentic, is what Benjamin referred to as its "aura." In this Article, we pursue Benjamin's idea and consider how it applies in today's digital environment where reproduction technologies have grown immensely more powerful. It turns out that ubiquitous reproduction, both mechanical and digital, has not led to the withering away of aura. It has, if anything, strengthened our desire for auratic experience and has also provoked new strategies to produce and sustain aura or some simulacrum of it.