The copyright debate is often mired in legalese that prevents a broader understanding of intellectual property. The real crisis in the age of sampling culture, says academic Marcus Boon, is the limited framework for understanding the concept of copying: how or why is something considered as being like another, and what are the political, aesthetic and ethical issues that impact our perception of similarity?

Boon — an Associate Professor of English at York and frequent WIRE contributor — attempted to unpack the issue by reading the first chapter of his upcoming book, In Praise of Copying for U of T’s Literary Studies Speaker Series on Nov 21. In a small Northrop Frye Hall classroom (and yes, there was one crack about whether or not the talk made Boon a "strike-breaker") filled for the most part with graduate students and academics, Boon discussed the Louis Vuitton bag as a way to map out this copying "economy" (heads up: Heidegger, Benjamin and Mahayana Buddhist philosophy are involved).

Introduced to one of the most copied objects in the world through an undergrad who sold LV counterfeits on the side, Boon became obsessed and spent much of the last year scoping out both Canal Street vendors and the brand’s high-end fashion stores from New York to Tokyo. The British academic — whose previous book The Road of Excess dissected the history of drug literature — found not much separates the original from its knock-off.

Despite Vuitton’s aggressive campaigning against counterfeits (earlier this year, a Paris court ordered eBay to pay over $60 million to Vuitton for "damages" in allowing the sale of copies), there are outsourced manufacturers that will produce the "real" products during the daytime, and the illegal "fakes" during the evening. In Taiwan, there are five grades of copying, from cheap plastic fakes to the top-quality handmade versions featuring the "right" paperwork and sold for thousands. Clearly, Georges Vuitton (son of Louis) did not see how his attempt to trademark the product with the eponymous LV monogram pattern in 1896 would lead to such confusion.

Western society inherited from Plato the most popular concept of copying, that "everything is a copy" (also known as mimesis). Heidegger would later say that mimesis equals copying a presentation — “all copies are made and produced” quoted Boon — and the parodying of something in a manner. How’s a bag then the imitation of an idea?

Perhaps it has something to do with our concept of luxury. Boon showed an original 1927 Louis Vuitton ad with this delicious sales pitch: “The trunks that last a lifetime… is French but LOOKS French… not only IS the finest but APPEARS the finest.” The idea of an "essential" LV outward appearance is complicated, a sameness not easily differentiated between a real Canal Street stall with fake product and the faux Louis Vuitton stall (with real product) installed outside the Brooklyn Museum for their Takashi Murakami retrospective (the Japanese artist famously re-made the LV monogram in "super-flat" technicolour). Outsourced manufacturing muddies it further — is the Louis Vuitton bag really French? LV artistic director Marc Jacobs is American, after all.

So here's where Mahayana Buddhism comes in. "Sangsara" is the endless round of birth, death and rebirth that all living beings are subject to. Louis Vuitton would like you to believe in their version of a "projected" fixed original essence. But a bag isn’t really a living entity is it? It can’t do transcendence. The bag doesn’t know it’s a bag, and while Vuitton would lead you to believe that designation is key (neat seams, hologram authenticity cards, serial codes), it’s obviously unstable.

This whole "sameness" business — what exactly connects the original and the copy? “Copying can only occur when latent similarity can be brought out,” concludes Boon. Sameness isn’t prefixed or unchanged — it’s merely “undifferentiated.” Louis Vuitton assumes its power through a supposedly "binding" historical, political and aesthetic process. But it’s a parochial structure that requires a lot of lawsuits to ensure its luxury status isn’t diminished by the mass of its copies. It’s an authenticity that’s empty.