AMNA NAWAZ: The art of 3-D scanning.

Paul Solman looks at how technology is being used to examine and replicate classic works of art and some ethical questions about what it means to preserve authenticity and democratize access in an age when the line between originals and copies grows ever thinner.

It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

PAUL SOLMAN: Ever want to do this to a beloved painting before a museum guard said, don't touch?

Well, I did from the time I was a kid.

And now I actually can feel the paint.

This is an art tech story prompted by entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan.

JERRY KAPLAN, Stanford University: It's like a jackrabbit, but it's a robot.

PAUL SOLMAN: Kaplan has gurued me and you through the emerging high-tech world for a decade.

JERRY KAPLAN: Mary, what do you feel about your own death?

MARY, A.I.

: I guess, technically, I cannot die since I am a digital being.

PAUL SOLMAN: But what's the art angle?

JERRY KAPLAN: My mother died last year at the ripe old age of 99.

And one of her most prized possessions was a painting of me and my little sister from what was an unknown artist at the time by the name of Wayne Thiebaud.

And the picture was titled Children of the '60s.

PAUL SOLMAN: But now it's worth millions.

JERRY KAPLAN: Well, what do we do with it?

There are two of us, me and my sister.

And while we would both like to have a copy, the truth is that it's just too valuable.

PAUL SOLMAN: So, unlike King Solomon's split the baby in two, he came up with a high-tech solution.

JERRY KAPLAN: This is an exact, precise reproduction at a micro level.

PAUL SOLMAN: Of the Kaplans' Thiebaud and of this lady a half-a-millennium young.

The technology was first used to analyze her condition.

PATRICK ROBINSON, Arius Technology: Nobody expected these paintings to last for 500 years.

Particularly with the Mona Lisa, there are stress factors and twisting of wood and things that are certainly occurring over time.

PAUL SOLMAN: The surface, for example, has been cracking for centuries.

And eventually, says Patrick Robinson of Arius Technology, to preserve it will mean to store it safely away.

Same for other time-honored paintings and frescoes, van Goghs, Monets, and other works of the faraway past.

PATRICK ROBINSON: You can imagine cities that are affected by water levels and things like that and destruction.

We intend to be at the center point of those restorations or those historical archiving, if you will.

PAUL SOLMAN: And be rescuing art from disaster, says Arius adviser Marco Soriano.

MARCO SORIANO, CEO, Soriano Group and Family Office: Pulling the fire that took place in California, where billions of dollars of artwork were burned and not insured properly were lost.

The National Museum of Brazil also was destroyed, multiple masterpieces that had been there destroyed.

So we would like to preserve that part of culture of our civilization that can easily be erased if it's not protected properly.

PAUL SOLMAN: So how exactly to preserve works forever?

You can now create a high-tech laser scanner, apply it to the art.

PATRICK ROBINSON: We scan them to 10 microns, which is the same width of a 10th of the human hair or similar to an actual size of a blood vessel.

PAUL SOLMAN: Arius engineering head Roland Dela Cuesta.

ROLAND DELA CUESTA, Arius Technology: You can see the fine cracks, you can see paint strokes to the level of a three-sable hairbrush.

And then on top of that, you get the color.

PAUL SOLMAN: And besides solving problems like the Kaplan estate or saving the Mona Lisa: PATRICK ROBINSON: Making it easier for restorations, for insurance, for valuations.

You look at The Girl With the Pearl, when that was restored they used a print on the wall of the museum.

PAUL SOLMAN: Did people know that it was not the original?

Could they tell?

PATRICK ROBINSON: I would -- you know what, Paul?

I say, universally, anything we do, no one can tell without knowing.

PAUL SOLMAN: The scanner was used to make multiples of contemporary artist Stale Amsterdam's portrait of Salvador Dali.

PATRICK ROBINSON: Just like Andy Warhol did editions of tomato soup cans with a red background, with a blue background, with a white background, whatever it might be.

PAUL SOLMAN: On YouTube, adviser Marco Soriano, an electric motorcycle maker, doesn't strike you as an old master buff, but he joined the Arius team to expand the business.

MARCO SORIANO: If you're the buyer of that piece of art, of artifact, it needs to have some kind of a record so that you can understand what it is.

So our technology would, in a certain way, authenticate if that's real or not.

PAUL SOLMAN: He's also nuts over Piero della Francesca's 15th century Resurrection.

MARCO SORIANO: When I saw it for the first time, it almost made me cry.

It has such a strong and meaningful value to all Christianity, to all Catholics in the world.

PAUL SOLMAN: Arius is scanning the already damaged fresco.

ADRIAN RANDOLPH, Northwestern University: That really is a cultural historical object which, spreading it around the world, having other people who can't travel to Central Italy, in the case of -- Italy in the case of Piero della Francesca, that sounds good to me.

PAUL SOLMAN: Art historian Adrian Randolph does see potential downsides.

ADRIAN RANDOLPH: What happens when you have many, many objects which are reproduced?

The value of the original might decline.

So I assume there could be some sort of financial, what, disruption to the market.

PAUL SOLMAN: And aside from the economics is the issue of how we experience art.

ADRIAN RANDOLPH: Even just in terms of a cultural artifact, does it change its status, which is fascinating and a little destabilizing, I think, for those of us who have always emphasized students and experts going to see the things on site.

PAUL SOLMAN: Amy Herman, an art historian and educator, cites a German philosopher for inspiration.

AMY HERMAN, Art Historian and Educator: As Walter Benjamin said so long ago, he said, there never is a perfect copy of a work of art.

No such perfect copy ever exists because it's missing its presence and its time and its place.

PAUL SOLMAN: Herman too argues that the way we view original art is a singular experience.

AMY HERMAN: I think that this process of using this 3-D scanner opens our eyes, literally and figuratively, to things that we couldn't see before, augments our appreciation, but it doesn't necessarily change that immediacy, that experience of sitting in a Sansepolcro or sitting in Frick's galleries and having that one-on-one with the work of art.

PAUL SOLMAN: But here in my house, this laser-scanned Burial at Sea by British painter JMW Turner is a pretty singular experience too, and a tangible one.

For the "PBS News Hour," Paul Solman.