ABSTRACT
This article explores the collapse of traditional authorship paradigms in the era of the Virtual Influencer, an entity challenging classical ideas of attribution, authorship, and legal personhood. Using Arthur Schopenhauer’s critique of originality and Michel Foucault’s ‘author function’, the article redefines the digital celebrity not as a rights-bearing individual but as a performative, algorithmically mediated interface. The legal frameworks of copyright and publicity rights are still tied to the Romantic view of the autonomous and original author, a model that has become outdated when the author’s name functions less as a symbol of origin and more as a flexible node of institutional control and branding.
The article advocates for a functional paradigm grounded in control, contribution, and infrastructural mediation rather than originality or identity-based ownership. In place of proprietary models of identity, the article proposes a relational, post-authorial legal framework attuned to the synthetic nature of digital visibility. What is at stake is not merely the future of celebrity or intellectual property, but the very capacity of the law to respond meaningfully to the post-authorial age. To do so, the law must finally heed the warnings of Schopenhauer and Foucault, not by defending the author, but by releasing it.
Moldawer, Mira, ‘What’s in a Name?’: Authorship without a Subject, Ownership without a Self in the Age of Algorithmic Fame (July 17, 2025).
Leave a Reply