> The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position
It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.)
I was initially sympathetic to the museum, as it's common for public funding to be tight, and revenue from the gift shop or commercial licencing of their objects can fill the gap. I don't know about France, but I expect the ministry has been heavily pushing public museums to increase their income in this way.
However, that doesn't justify the deception described by the article.
This same person fought for years to get the Berlin Egyptian museum to release 3D scans of the famous Nefertiti bust. The museum also claimed it would undermine its revenue streams through the gift shop, but as the case progressed, that turned out to be very misleading - the museum had made less than 5000 EUR over ten years from 3D scans.
They’re afraid of losing out on the revenue from selling replicas, etc. which is probably a very reasonable fear given that the guy filing suit and writing this blog post runs a company that creates replica artwork?
> SPK confirmed it had earned less than 5,000 euro, total, from marketing the Nefertiti scan, or any other scan for that matter. SPK also admitted it did not direct even that small revenue towards digitization, explaining that it was not obliged to do so. In the nearly 10 years since it had created the Nefertiti scan, SPK had completely failed to commercially exploit the valuable data idling on its hard drives.
Right, no one is buying the digital scans. But tons of people buy physical replicas- I have been a volunteer at a different museum and our physical models of our most famous artifacts were very nice money makers for us, so I presume they would be for them as well. And using that digital scan you can make your own competing physical replica. Which is why the museum doesn't really want to make it easy for any 3D printer to compete with them.
Revenue from “marketing the 3d scans” is not the same as “revenue from selling replicas” and it is the latter that they are trying to protect, not the sale of the scans directly
Why would they lie about it then? These museums are subsidized by tax payers, not only just local money but often with additional EU funding as well. The scans were paid for by the public. This seems comically evil for no apparent reason.
Bureaucracies always argue for the continuation of the bureaucracy and its funding, no matter how insane or small. It's what they naturally do and you have to explicitly fight against it.
Because among copyright/IP maximalists, the whole point is that they own an idea or a picture or a look or a fashion and deserve to keep it to themselves forever. It's not a rational attitude, but it's a real one and unfortunately rather common.
Flip the script and make everything public unless it has a sort-of "license" which explicitly restricts access. People can proactively restrict access to their work, which would allow for lawsuits, and others can see the potentially very restrictive licenses which some will put on their stuff and possibly learn to avoid such licenses.
Hard to say how that would look or happen in practice but it's interesting to think about.
Although I agree(stuff bought with tax money should go to tax payers), you do realize that many people don't see it that way. Especially when their career rely on withholding the stuff in question.
Another example: if people have access to 3D scans, then they might come to the museum anymore because they can make a virtual tour... (I doubt of that, but well, it's an example)
But, of course, as a tax payer, I wanted these 3D scans (somebody voted for that at some point). So now the pandora's box is open.
The problem, I guess, is that a museum is not there to be profitable. Unfortunately, "modern management" crept in there and now they have to be somehow profitable or at least make an effort to be so. And so, information withholding is a way to achieve that goal.
As a society we have to choose: we keep museums so that everyone can enjoy art, or we think they have to be profitable first...
Maintaining the status quo is almost always the path of least resistance for organizations like this. Saying no to something new is easy, to say yes puts you out on a limb with uncertain strength.
Maybe they were worried about sales of photos of the bust, and other products of the bust but not created using the scans? Could one take all the scans and produce a coffee table book of photos similar to what the gift shops often sell?
Honestly the whole gift shop argument is weird. I have no sympathy for them. You can get plenty of knockoffs now if you wanted: the world is full of Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, Eiffel Tower, etc keychains and trinkets even without scans. Gift shops already have to compete with those.
It seems that with the advent/improvements in AR/VR that measuring the direct sales of scan data is the wrong way to look at the losses.
If many people can experience a 75% compelling viewing of the bust (or the pyramids, Galapagos, Chichen Itza, etc.), the losses in tourism to those sites is far more than the lost sales of scan data.
I doubt it. People go to see the original Mona Lisa when they can own a reproduction for less than the cost of the flight. I don't see why those who would have gone to see it would suddenly accept a reproduction just because it's AR/VR.
There are hundreds of places I’d like to experience in my lifetime. I probably have the time left to go to perhaps 50 of them (max). Surely being able to experience some of those 300 in VR will affect my lifetime travel plans and I highly doubt that I’m alone.
That's my point. Your top 50 are going to stay your top 50. If you've always wanted to see the Mona Lisa in person you're not going to change your plan because you saw an image of it.
My top 50 to see in person would definitely change if 25 of them can be experienced in VR. (I might still go in person to my top 3, but there's a lot of nearly even exchange among spots 4-100.)
This doesn’t seem likely, the major tourist destinations during the busy season are so crowded, or slot limited, that it’s a pretty unpleasant experience.
I very quickly had no sympathy at all with the museum. It obtained funding to do the scans with the express purpose of providing to the public, and then decided not to.
> In an ironic development, the judges specifically reasoned against musée Rodin’s trade secrecy claim by citing its 3D digitization funding applications to the Ministry of Culture, in which the museum stipulated its commitment to publishing its scans. The museum had attempted to hide these funding applications from us and the court, telling the court they did not exist.
In the previous story over the Nefertiti bust, the German museum tried to use this gift shop defense, but then when pressed, you could see that they made almost no money from it.
This the law of unintended consequences in action. I suspect that neither the government nor museums thought there was any legal obligations to make 3D scans public and I'd wager that the legislator did not have that in mind when they drafted the freedom of information laws.
But then, suddenly (as per linked article):
"The Commission on Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) ... had never before considered any dispute about 3D scans. It affirmed my request that musée Rodin communicate copies of its scans to me, determining for the first time that public agencies’ 3D scans are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public."
A decision which has been going up the chain of courts since and is apparently close to the possibly dramatic climax.
Indeed, the commercial argument is therefore irrelevant to this and the museum was clutching at straws there, really...
Good laws try to be future-proof. Transparency of government is a big deal in liberal democracies.
It's incongruous for a museum to resist something like this, when exhibiting artifacts to the public is one of the main reasons for their very existence.
Legislators are human beings. "Future-proof" is one thing, guessing all possible cases is quite another and perhaps their aim simply wasn't things like 3D scans at all, as mentioned, because freedom of information laws came about to tackle a completely different issue (which was indeed transparency, not scans of sculptures...)
That's how it is and key to this case, and not really discussed in any comments. I am not commenting on the museum's actions to defend against this, which they must think is in their interest. So I don't understand the hate... it's getting difficult to discuss on more and more topics.
I just don't understand how you sit on the museums side of the trial on this, without seriously questioning your own position and conceding immediately.
They were basically arguing that they are entitled to hide those scan artifacts to better protect their gift shop?! How can they even reconcile those arguments with preserving the artists legacy/serving the common good?
I'm also surprised at how nonchalantly the french supreme (!!) court seems to cope with the museum just ignoring their two month deadline for three months in the new trial... Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
My conclusion is that there is either pure stubbornness or some weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side, because I have no other explanation why they would fight so hard for their position seemingly against all reason.
> weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side
That's exactly it. I work on a website that makes ancient artefacts accessible. A lot of them are in museums. You wouldn't believe how many museums:
- don't want to show you their archive
- don't want to let you take pictures
- want you to share only low res pictures
- want you to get permission before you can "publish" their artefacts, etc.
It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them.
It's ridiculous. Fortunately, the people working on the website are relentless, and manage to eventually get collection after collection photographed and added mostly by being patient. For some collections it took 20 years before they got access -- but since everyone uses their website, and everyone apart from the local museum director wants the stuff to be in there, eventually they get access to most things.
(Museums in Italy are the worst, allegedly. They really think they own antiquity.)
That is because the stated goal of "preservation" isn't really their goal. Thats only lip-service.
Their actual goal is getting visitors, and any kind of usable information in the form of photos, videos, 3d-scans, transcriptions or whatever leaving their premises is a problem. Add to that the associated huge business of tourism and you have the explanation why the state and the courts (who are usually good buddies with the state and the upper class, including the cultural elite) also don't want to change that status quo.
Ah, the standard Music Industry response to Napster, alive and well decades later.
"Make the information hard to get! We own it!"
Never realizing that sampling of the information makes it just that much more prestigious and desirable to us, the unwashed masses, willing to pay to visit a museum that has AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS.
If you start with the assumption that every view is a lost sale, you're going to have a really bad time.
Outside of the Louvre and maybe the Smithsonian, there are no current world-famous museums, simply regionally or subculture-appreciated museums, some with bygone fame that a small portion of the older population would recognize. The Rodin Museum may be popular among a tiny niche slice of people, but if they were to make an internally consistent strategy that they want growth then they'd release more information.
Actually, imho, the AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS are actually useless. You can not touch them, get close, rotate them, look at them properly, take your time. You are just number 29387 that day visiting the Mona Lisa, you get 5s to view it, then the line moves on.
A high-res photo or 3d-scan allows you to do all those things (maybe except really touching them).
So aside from the emotional benefit of having been near the real original piece for a few seconds, all digital derivatives are logically far better.
When we were there, I took a picture of the Mona Lisa strictly for the crowd in the foreground. To capture the memory of the stupid number of people who seemingly only come to the museum to see that one piece of art.
Then we went and spent a few hours enjoying the rest of the museum, where there is plenty of art I appreciated more.
Comically, smaller museums generally have a "take a ton of pictures, share them on social, tell everyone" attitude because they want their name out there in order to drive foot traffic and other support.
Trying to pull up the ladder is something people only do once they're on top.
>It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them.
I think people really don't appreciate just how many artifacts museums have that they don't show to the public, don't document, and largely just sit on and gatekeep. It's especially bad when you consider the movement in museum curation from showing large numbers of artifacts with minimal annotation to smaller numbers of highly annotated more "significant" items.
> (Museums in Italy are the worst, allegedly. They really think they own antiquity.)
They are the worst and they do in fact own antiquity: thanks to some idiotic national law, they can claim rights on stuff that has been public domain for centuries before the copyright was even invented. There was a lot of debate about this after a major museum sued a bunch of fashion brands, see this article for example [1].
> I'm also surprised at how nonchalantly the french supreme (!!) court seems to cope with the museum just ignoring their two month deadline for three months in the new trial...
The conseil d’État is nothing like a Supreme Court. It is an administrative body, not a court of law. This phrase was used because it was easier than explaining how it actually works to a presumably mostly-American audience. France has a civil law system, there cannot be anything like the American Supreme Court.
> Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
It is not a court, and it does not have the powers American judges have. The role of the Council of State (one of them, anyway, and the relevant one here) is to rule on administrative matters. They cannot decide to fine someone or put someone in jail. They can decide that a government body was wrong on something and make it change, that’s it.
Welcome to France! France is built on the idea that the public can't be trusted, has not really reached adulthood (won't ever) and needs to be coached by an army of civil servants whose job is to protect the State and its finances.
It's not corruption, exactly; it's the idea that the interests of the State are paramount, and everything else doesn't really matter.
If the State sells reproductions of Rodin's work, well then you shouldn't be allowed to, and you certainly aren't entitled to any kind of help.
There is no supreme court in France, this is a gross mistranslation of "Court de Cassation", which is where you bring your case after you have lost your appeal, and is the last court where you can try to argue your point.
No, it's different in many many ways. And there are not just one, but four courts of last resort in France:
- Cour de Cassation, for civil matters
- Conseil d'État, for matters regarding the administration / the State
- Tribunal des Conflits: tasked with deciding who's right when the Cour de Cassation and the Conseil d'État disagree
- Conseil Constitutionnel: issues rulings about the constitutionality of laws, both new (before they become law) and existing ones (QPC)
This doesn't stop here however; there are two upper courts in the European Union, than can invalidate decisions issued by national courts:
- Court of Justice (in Luxembourg)
- Court of Human Rights (in Strasbourg)
- - -
Edit: Don't you love the idea of "Tribunal des Conflits"? The original idea was that the State could not be brought to court, its decisions being made by "the people" who is the absolute sovereign.
Then France gradually accepted the idea that State's decision could be challenged, and created a whole different judicial system, the "justice administrative". It took a looong time: from 1800 to... 1980. A much simpler approach could have been to let people try their case against the State before the existing courts, but no... much better to build another system with its own rules, its own judges, etc.
An inevitable consequence of having two different systems is that they sometimes disagree. (Another reason why it would have been so much simpler to just have one system.) Since the two systems are sometimes at odds with one another, we created... a third system! This was in 1872, so quite early in the process.
This Tribunal des Conflits is a referee of sorts whose only job is to stop the fights between the two justice systems. I think that's great and tells a lot about the French way of solving problems: just add a new bureaucratic authority on top of all existing ones.
One difference among many: the Cour de Cassation does not issue decisions, exactly; it can only hold or break a decision from a lower court. If it chooses to break the lower court's decision (casser=to break) then the case is sent back to said court to be decided again, with new guidance from the upper court.
The description was incomplete. The cour de cassation is not supreme at all, there are the Constitutional Council and the Court of Justice of the EU above it. As well as more specialised international courts like the European Court of Human Rights. There is a summary here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_of_France .
In any case, France has a civil law system; there cannot be a court as powerful as the Supreme Court of the US is. Viewing any of these institutions as similar to SCOTUS is bound to create a lot of confusion.
"The" supreme court, if one assumes a US-centric definition, comes with a lot of assumptions on the nature of law and the power structure of the various government branches. Which generally do not hold outside of the US and certainly not in France.
So yes, it is "a" supreme court, but that doesn't really help understanding, because it is not "the" supreme court.
Well the SCOTUS functions are divided among the Cour de cassation (last ditch appeal) and the Conseil Constitutionnel (Checks if a law is in line with the constitution)
No need to excuse yourself as a French speaker but not French, the baguettes will indeed unscrupulously bend people over if it serves their own interest without excuses or valid justification.
>They were basically arguing that they are entitled to hide those scan artifacts to better protect their gift shop?! How can they even reconcile those arguments with preserving the artists legacy/serving the common good?
If the museum folds and the collection gets auctioned off in parts and public access to it is reduced then the common good is not served.
I think this is an asinine argument and they're mostly just protecting their own paychecks but there is a kernel of truth to it.
>I'm also surprised at how nonchalantly the french supreme (!!) court seems to cope with the museum just ignoring their two month deadline for three months in the new trial... Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
We all know that justice is only legally blind, not functionally blind. When you're the favorite or you're state adjacent you get a lot more leeway.
One of the things I find really funny about the law is that yeah, just not responding as long as you can or until someone acts to force you to is a common strategy, because it mostly works and adds cost and complexity to holding someone accountable. Some portion of plaintiffs will give up and not pursue even very valid claims if you just make the entire process a slog.
Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. The public can freely access hundreds of scans of classical sculpture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and visitors to the Smithsonian’s website can view, navigate, and freely download thousands of high-quality scans of artifacts ranging from dinosaur fossils to the Apollo 11 space capsule.
Has anyone used these in games? They would be great easter eggs and they have artistry and design that is far beyond almost anything DIY.
No doubt someone has put some of them into games. However, most likely not in it's original shape/form, as the scans usually produce highly inefficiently (but high resolution, great for renders) meshes. The meshes from scans tend to be a mess, and when inserting a 3D model for games, you care a lot about how optimized the meshes are, and that the mesh has a low polygon count as otherwise you'll tank the performance quickly.
So since a developer couldn't just copy-paste the model into the game (requires a prepass to fix issues/optimize before import), it'll take valuable time from other things for just this easter egg. Again, no doubt someone has done this at one point or another, but that's probably why it isn't as common as someone could think.
Sadly, it's simply too much detail to be able to import straight up. Luckily, Nanite ("Virtualized Geometry") and similar implementations starts to give us tools so we can stop caring about things like this and let the game engine optimize stuff on the fly.
The published British Museum Rosetta stone is not even what I would consider a high quality scan today. In a proper scan you would be able to easily discern the carved writing just from the geometry. At 1mm faces, it's actually a pretty good candidate to dump straight into UE5 nanite so I disagree fundamentally that it is not able to be used in games. The only real question for the modern developer is whether it makes sense to spend ~50MB budget to put the thing in.
> it's actually a pretty good candidate to dump straight into UE5 nanite so I disagree fundamentally that it is not able to be used in games.
Yeah, obviously the new virtualized geometry approach modern engines are taking kind of make that argument less valid. I thought I was doing a good job ending my comment with mentioning this recent change, but maybe I didn't make it clear enough :)
Still, let's not forget that the detail, the last nuances, is what makes great art so powerful. Lots of people can paint sunflowers or a cathedral (or make a typical computer game).
Working that into a computer game is of course a big practical issue, as you say; also, unless the players will zoom way in for some reason, possibly the maximum effect is a resolution that's still less than what the museums provide. But maybe for the ultimate prize at the end, a close look in the treasure chest, when all the other on-screen action is done? It's hard to provide a visual reward that lives up to the moment, or exceeds it, after 100 hours of play.
Even modern high end graphics cards use abstractions of the base data to create vast amounts of the final output's fine detail. For example tessellation and other techniques used for complex geometry like compound curves, which allow millions or billions of polygons can be visually simulated without needing to be present as polygon data, increasing opportunity for processing parallelization, while reducing load on communication busses and VRAM.
As an example, you could probably represent something like the grip of this FLIR camera in a couple hundred polygons and surface/curve definitions to help the rendering engine tesselate correctly. On the other hand, this overall scan is 357000 vertexes. Sure you can simplify it and bake a bunch of the texture into a normal map, but that then requires manually reworking the texture map and various other postprocessing steps to avoid creating a glitchy mess.
> it wouldn't be easy because these scans are highly detailed and so would require too many polygons to be loaded at once
In practice a a 3d artist could very easily create low poly models for these objects. For that low poly replica the high poly model can serve as a useful reference. (But to be honest many artist can just look at images of the object and do the same.)
This is not even hard, on the order of minutes (for something like the Rosetta Stone) or days (for something seriously detailed).
In this case where there is a will, there is a way. In fact this "reduction" step very often part of the game creation pipeline already. Monsters/characters/objects very often get sculpted at a higher resolution and then those high resolution meshes are reduced down to something more manageable (while they bake the details into a bump map texture, or similar).
Not too much, it does actually work :) The concept is generally called "virtualized geometry" and Unreal's implementation is called "Nanite" but others are starting to pop up too, like the virtualized geometry implementation in Bevy.
For rendering an individual piece, maybe not; but as part of much larger scene with many objects, animation, and rendering effects, it would place an unnecessary burden on the GPU.
It would be much easier to simply have a 3D artist create the object anew from scratch, in a format and resolution that best fits the game.
A bit simplified but yeah. In the industry I think it's commonly referred to as "cleaning up the topology" or "simplifying the topology" where "topology" is the structure of the mesh essentially. You'd put the scan/model through something like this: https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/retopologise-3d-scans-...
> is this true with top spec machines too?
Games frequently feature 100s (sometimes 1000s) of models at the same time, so the optimization of each model is important. Take a look at the launch of Cities Skylines 2 for an example of a game that launched without properly optimized 3D models, the performance was absolutely abysmal because the human/resident models were way more detailed than justified for a city simulation game.
The kind of person who’s good at making games and is excited about ancient artifacts makes their own 3D assets that make the most sense for their game.
It depends what you mean: If you mean, they like the idea of 'ancient' and 'artifacts', they may make up their own. If they like the actual history, then the whole point of the ancient artificats in the museums is that they are actual things from actual ancient civilizations - making something up would defeat the purpose.
Also, as I said, almost certainly they lack the artistry to match what's in the museum, simply because what's in the museum is often the pinnacle of human creativity over millenia.
I've been to an art museum with a large collection of ancient Greek and Egyptian statues. A lot of the statues are damaged, or were painted and the paint has long since worn off.
I'd love to walk through a VR recreation of what they believe the statues looked like when they were new. It balances the need for preservation of what remains, and the need to preserve the subjective interpretation of what the art was meant to be.
> ... are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public.
They can still utterly frustrate you in the way they do this. They could fe print them out layer by layer and only show these in a specific "viewing room". I have seen my government (Belgium) use this strategy when it comes to architectural plans. In essence, it's public (you can access them) but it's also rather useless.
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.” '
I guess they want to limit your time with them. If you could study them whenever you want with whatever tools you have, you can easily find conflicts between the plans and the building regulations. This would allow you to block the planned construction works.
Even with the current protocol people find ways to block "progress".
For example, the Oosterweel Link [0], which has been postponed multiple times.
This is not the most outrageous thing about taxpayer money at work that I learned today.
That would be the fact that local branches of the ministry of agriculture require wind turbine builders to put blue dyed water in concrete to make it friendly to all life or something, I'm not sure I understand, it's called Pneumatit®, and I'm not making this up.
It's biodynamics, it's biogeology (neither biology nor geology, not an actual science, it's more like dowsers). It's not only about wind turbines, it's in so many buildings now, but because it's not only approved but required on some public projects, it's... interesting. It's homeopathy for concrete, and like homeopathy in France, it'll receive government subsidies for far longer than it should.
Pneumatit® is a liquid additive that permanently anchors a fine biological activity (liveliness) in the concrete
Many people experience adverse effects that come from concrete - regardless of the design. This ranges from slightly subliminal discomfort to irritability, inner cold sensations, joint pain, exhaustion and organic disorders. Underlying such sensations is a reality, because the production of cement breaks through the bottom of the natural processes of life. Result: a lifeless building material with an absorbing effect on our organism [0].
This stuff is apparently made from small bird femurs and nautilus shells grounded into powder, then add water, then diluted a million times so that they can sell olympic pools of the thing without running out of raw material. It's textbook homeopathic dilution.
There was an interesting project from the Natural History Museum using a syncatron particle accelerator to 3d scan some part their the famous 300 year old insect collection and make it openly available but that announcement was 2021 and I can't seem to find the results let alone see if they were released to the public.
I am okay with public information being free to use commercially, with a huge disclaimer though.
Wherever copyright is applicable, the public should retain it, that's what public domain is for. Any derived works, commercial or otherwise should also be in the public domain.
If you fight for "public access" so that you can make your own stuff locked behind a copyright, then you are the hypocrite here.
an interesting example where this has been problematic is OpenStreetMap. They can't ingest a lot of government data b/c their project requires a relicense with their attribution-requirement (where all users are forced to have an ugly OSM bumper sticker on their maps)
What you call an ugly bumper sticker is credit where it is due, but also an important recruitment mechanism for new mappers, which improves the map. The /copyright page is our biggest landing page on the website, even above the base / page. Attribution is also a requirement of many proprietary map providers.
Wait, what? If the government source is public domain, OSM (or anyone else) can take it and derive from it and can then impose whatever license OSM wants, including an attribution requirement. Did you mean the other way around?
Actually OSM's license is so weak on the attribution it requires, that OSM does not ingest CC-BY data, because OSM believes their further distribution would not satisfy CC-BY's attribution requirement.
There's nothing to "retain" once copyright is over (aside from moral rights, which are forever... which I guess becomes questionable after the death of the author ? But moral rights are not transferrable anyway).
Instead for calling to basically blow up the whole legal framework around derivative works, maybe we should focus on bringing copyright terms back to more sane durations (like the original 14 years, renewable once) ?
That seems to benefit large corporations at the expense of smaller artists. Either you focus on making money or some large corporation will swoop in the second you can't and exploit your work for their own profit.
Presumably, once the copyright is allowed to expire, it can't be sold and then reinstated.
I'm okay with large corporations pouring their money at the government to keep copyrights for useless things alive, even if it means we can't legally copy useless things for a bit longer.
Exactly, if the clock is ticking for them to bid on it, to buy it off the small business, it gives the small business power, and should also make it easier for the small business to get decent loans/investments.
Btw, if I'm not mistaken, I first read about this proposal in the book "Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society" by Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl
I love the idea of preserving history through 3D scans. When I learned about Gobekli Tepe a few years ago it caught my heart, and since then I've been wishing that someone would produce a detailed 3D scan of the site. Does anyone know if there's any company, group, or non-profits trying to make this happen for key historical landmarks? Most people are unlikely to be able to visit such locations, and they probably can't handle that many visitors, so making a digital version seems like a great compromise.
I haven’t played all the games but the recent ones I tried had a historical tour mode where you get to explore day-in-the-life of an Ancient Greek city or Viking village, with people going about their routines working, trading, farming, gathering. With VR it would be the closest thing to time travel we currently have.
And they do have many of the historical landmarks in pretty stunning detail, with drapes and paintings of what it most probably looked like back then.
There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it.
When I see some of the virtual reconstructions of Ancient Rome or Pompeii, I wonder if the real thing will be of less interest than the reconstituted, repaired one.
I think this is normal - there are now billions of people in the world and only so much "great art". I was in a huge crowd looking at the Mona Lisa. There was nothing magical about the experience. I'd rather have my own copy or put my VR glasses on and enjoy it in, say, the house where it was first displayed.
I can see museums fearing the loss of visitors or at least fearing that someone else will make billions out of virtualising it and they won't. I mean, search engines make billions out of the knowledge other people built over centuries. AI takes open source information and code and makes billions selling the embodied knowledge that was given away for free. It's not as if corporations aren't happy to rape the commons and call themselves heroes for doing it.
This isn't a good reason for the museum's attitude but I don't look to the future free exploitation of public information with unalloyed optimism.
> There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it.
For certain things, I could see that. But for many things I go see, it's being there that is part of the point. Knowing that I'm seeing or touching the actual thing the artist saw and touched, or standing in a place where the builders worked build it, etc. Seeing a perfect representation misses that.
I half agree, but I've been to a few of these things and it's all somewhat debatable because you're not really supposed to touch, or there are millions of people and you can't just sit and enjoy, or you don't know enough about them to understand deeply what you are seeing.
Ruined cities really don't look or feel anything like what they were. You miss an incredible amount by not being able to see them as the inhabitants would have. On the other hand you see the countryside and when that hasn't changed (e.g. the sea moving out) you get a feeling of context but .... even that is odd when the original people that lived there are long gone and a totally different culture has supplanted them. You smell the smells of the plants at least and that's good.
OTOH I can imagine the virtual part of this becoming incredibly good - with smell and touch even. Imagine lying in your Roman house in Pompeii and eating dinner while reclining. Listening to the street noise outside while enjoying the garden in your courtyard? I can imagine putting yourself inside the historical context to a degree that would require an extreme feat of imagination in the real place.
With paintings it's just the crowd, often being on your feet and the comical way in which one's favorite painting turns out to be tiny in real life and much worse than the print for that reason.
> Ruined cities really don't look or feel anything like what they were. You miss an incredible amount by not being able to see them as the inhabitants would have.
Oh I totally agree with this! And I'd say it applies similarly to modern cities. I find it sort of hilarious to go somewhere like London which has a huge amount of historical architecture, but so surrounded by modernity that you get a little whiplash every time you turn around.
I have to get as close as I can to what I'm looking at, preferably close enough to mostly shut out the existence of everyone around, the noise, etc.
I think you make very good points. I would love the virtual experience that tried to show what it was really like at the time these artifacts were created. I'd still enjoy the part about seeing it all in person, though, because that's just me -- being in the presence of the physical object really sparks my imagination. So ... I want both options, please.
It probably depends a lot on personality. For myself, I obsessively studied space exploration history as a child. When I was much older, I toured National Air and Space Museum in District of Columbia and found it terribly boring, no new knowledge, nothing I hadn't read about before.
I can see your point of view. It definitely is going to depend on what you are going for. I've never gone to a museum for knowledge. I enjoyed the Smithsonian (though, aside from a few specific artifacts, I really prefer Udvar-Hazy to the museum on the mall) solely because of the feeling I got being in the presence of the actual machines that I've learned so much about. Reading about Glamorous Glennis or the Enola Gay is one thing, but to stand in front of it and think "that right there is the actual plane Chuck Yeager flew past mach 1" is 100% of why I go to the museum.
It's also very timely: next week I have arriving a portable 3D scanner (an Einstar Vega) precisely because as a hobbyist sculptor the only way I can analyze these works to inform my practice is to go to galleries and scan the works myself (sometimes very surreptitiously!). It's crazy that I need to buy a £2000 piece of equipment and produce have a tonne of CO2 just to be able to look at a piece of art from x00 years ago on my computer.
Photogrammetry is great with textured, consistently lit, opaque objects.
Blank white plaster, less so. You really want some kind of microtexture to grab on to for it to be anywhere close to a structured light scanner. That may mean you want a macro lens and a thousand exposures because you're grabbing on to microscopic surface roughness or dust. Not necessarily easy to do surreptitiously.
Yes they are different things and photogrammetry isn't a replacement for a "real" 3d scanner. But this is about museums which largely aren't unlit plain white surfaces. Getting models of museum objects is generally doable by anyone without thousands in specialised equipment. Taking a video or pictures is a lot less weird than pulling out any scanner.
Why exactly is non-commercial open access problematic?
I think the author is going overboard by framing this as some kind of righteous crusade for the public access. After all, he is interested in making profit from this. Sure, public funding paid for it, so then why should the profits be privatized?
There is no privatization here (moving the scans from public domain to private), the author is seeking the opposite, shifting the scans to the public unencumbered.
Yes, to be commercialized and privatized by the author. Somehow all of the "open access projects" on the authors website seem to be concerned with releasing 3D models scanned by others, and not you know, his own projects. I don't see any commitments to publish derived work and such.
I know that the story of an independent artist fighting a big bureaucratic public institutions is something that would get a lot of sympathy here, but this really isn't that much of a "David and Goliath" kind of tale. French heritage and research entities are underfunded and understaffed, they don't have competent lawyers, or indeed funding to afford those, as we can clearly see from this case. One litigation-happy American can run circles around them and profit from it too.
If as soon as the heritage work gets 3D scanned with French public funds, it will immediately get scooped and monetized by private sector, wouldn't the ultimate outcome be that less objects get scanned? Why would the museums even bother fighting for the digitization grant funds?
Great read and an important battle for an open society.
It strongly reminds me of universities and their model to sell papers to the public after the public already paid for their creation. Hopefully this ruling will somehow help in that regard to open up publicly funded work.
That jumped out to me as well, particularly given the otherwise high quality of the writing. It's an example of what I perceive as a more general phenomenon - spelling errors, particularly confusion of uncommon homonyms[note], appear to have increased in frequency. I previously attributed it to the internet simply lowering the bar for "publishing" to the less educated, and the greater proportion of text that makes it to our eyeballs without the intercession of an editor - but seeing such a glaring mistake in a text clearly written by someone with otherwise very good command of the language makes me wonder if there are other factors, perhaps the rise of verbal media such as audiobooks, podcasts, and YouTube channels.
[note: I see "fazed" spelled as "phased" more often than I see it spelled correctly now. I suspect its proper spelling will eventually die out.]
It has taken me a long time to let go of "to beg the question" as exclusively meaning "to employ circular reasoning" and not cringe when I see it used to mean "to raise the question".
What gave me calm to accept such changes is understanding that the language we use today is a result of such changes. Awful once meant full of awe and now means very bad or unpleasant. Nice no longer means foolish and now means pleasant. Girl referred to a young person of either gender and now specifically means a female child. Silly once meant happy or fortunate and now means foolish or absurd. Meat once referred to food of all kinds, not just animal flesh. I imagine there were people who experienced these changes with some despair. But everything's okay. English is still expressive and meaningful. The sky has not fallen. The center holds.
I suspect the true rationale may be more deeply based on art history than either the museum or this article are letting on. To understand why, I think it's important to reckon with what happened to "art" as an institution when the processes of reproduction became cheap and readily available during the 1900s. I can only sketch and I won't fully do it justice.
Before the 1900s, some methods of mechanical reproduction did exist. These methods could be used to mechanically reproduce the written word and very specific forms of visual media. But one factor governed the creation of reproducible works: the work had to be made in a format that permitted reproduction. Put another way, the author of a work must have designed their work for reproduction, implicitly or explicitly consenting to it.
For example, a Japanese wood block carver chooses to make a wood block rather than draw directly on the page; this deliberate choice creates the means of mechanical reproduction. Even when this is done, the choice to do so often comes at prohibitive cost, and while the cost of reproduction is reduced, it remains nontrivial.
But for the rest of art and artists, exclusivity was not just implied, it was an expected standard. There is only one Mona Lisa. It was made in so-and-so year by so-and-so. Around this grew a nearly occult tradition of reverence for the individual, as expressed through their work - their true work, the one in front of you, unique and inviolable.
Through the 1900s artists were reckoning with the creation of film, and later, digital media. I won't rehash all these arguments. Suffice it to say that one main challenge was to the ethos of art itself. If the work is infinitely reproducible, then where has the artist gone? Today, anyone who wants to see the Mona Lisa has already done so. The original is a mere novelty, except to certain very rare specialists. This has only grown more true with digital media, as the ease of reproduction and fidelity have both increased dramatically.
Among a certain type of art culture enthusiast, or maybe dogmatist, there remains a belief that art has lost something material as a result of its reproducibility. And it is undeniably a reasonable belief that if people are provided the requisite data, they will, eventually, reproduce the artwork to a satisfactory degree.
To many of these people, call them any jeers you want, sculpture remains one of the last bastions where the occult value surrounding the artist, who made the work, has not been diminished, because no one has yet figured out how to mechanically reproduce a sculpture to a high degree of fidelity.
Certain museums hold this as a guiding principle, because it is their interpretation of what "art" is supposed to culturally mean. A 3D scan of a sculpture destroys that final bastion of sanctity against the oncoming tide of reproducible devaluation.
Now, I don't believe this argument is a good one. Frankly I think it's a bit Pollyanna, but I have to acknowledge I set it up so I could be strawmanning it a bit. But the reason we're not likely to hear it here is because, despite (what I suspect to be) its central importance to the Rodin, it is not, at its core, a legitimate legal argument.
"In response to the museum’s nonsensical technological claims, we submitted expert testimony from Professor Michael Kazhdan, full professor of computer graphics in the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and co-developer of the Poisson Surface Reconstruction algorithm, which is used worldwide in 3D scan data analysis. Professor Kazhdan explained to the court that documents in plaintext format are fundamentally well suited for preserving scan data, and that such documents are easily exploitable by experts and amateurs alike."
Yes. Yes. That must've felt satisfying.
"In response to Musee Rodin's nonsense, we present here the inventor of the basic techniques of 3D scanning, Dr. Kazhdan, from John Hopkins..."
What I feel about this is similar to what I feel about government-sponsored research institutes and universities not releasing their research to the public...
If you get money from the government, society is paying for your work so it's entitled to it.
Oh, you want to keep the data for yourself? DON'T ask or accept money from us the people.
> in private, RMN admits it won’t release its scans because it wants to protect its gift shops’ sales revenue from competition from the public making their own replicas.
The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position...
As if it would be more difficult to just buy the thing from the gift shop and make copies of that. With a physical object you can make molds directly from that without having to figure out how to turn a point-cloud file into a physical object.
It's a pretty bad argument even besides the lack of legal relevance.
No, that's why the author is using freedom of information laws to accomplish his goals. If you are a government institution - and these museums are - in a country with freedom of information laws, then it follows that you can be compelled to comply with them by the courts.
Except it turns out they also make basically no money from this right now - it's not a meaningful portion of their funding or other monetary support.
This is actually true of most large art museums. SF MoMa makes only 7% of revenue (not actual dollars in funding) from their gift shop and that number only goes in one direction over the years.
Smaller art museums often depend more but that is also changing.
It's also an argument, that even if you granted all there premises - could be quantifiable.
If the gift shop makes $x per year in toto, and some percentage is (or could be) 3D scans, you now have a maximum dollar amount that they can possibly be worth (by calculating the cost of a perpetual annuity). Can't be more - and so even in the worst case you've changed it from a "we will never" to a "we want $x before we do" question.
Data *should* be free, but in an age where predatory corps crawl the web to train models they hide behind paywalls, having control over your data means being able to explicitly give them to those that serve the common good.
I used to be sympathetic to causes such as this, but in the advent of the plunder of our digital cultural heritage I have become skeptical.
Why should proprietary AI get data payed for by the french tax payer?
> The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position
It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.)
I was initially sympathetic to the museum, as it's common for public funding to be tight, and revenue from the gift shop or commercial licencing of their objects can fill the gap. I don't know about France, but I expect the ministry has been heavily pushing public museums to increase their income in this way.
However, that doesn't justify the deception described by the article.
This same person fought for years to get the Berlin Egyptian museum to release 3D scans of the famous Nefertiti bust. The museum also claimed it would undermine its revenue streams through the gift shop, but as the case progressed, that turned out to be very misleading - the museum had made less than 5000 EUR over ten years from 3D scans.
https://reason.com/2019/11/13/a-german-museum-tried-to-hide-...
They’re afraid of losing out on the revenue from selling replicas, etc. which is probably a very reasonable fear given that the guy filing suit and writing this blog post runs a company that creates replica artwork?
The huge piles of revenue?
> SPK confirmed it had earned less than 5,000 euro, total, from marketing the Nefertiti scan, or any other scan for that matter. SPK also admitted it did not direct even that small revenue towards digitization, explaining that it was not obliged to do so. In the nearly 10 years since it had created the Nefertiti scan, SPK had completely failed to commercially exploit the valuable data idling on its hard drives.
Right, no one is buying the digital scans. But tons of people buy physical replicas- I have been a volunteer at a different museum and our physical models of our most famous artifacts were very nice money makers for us, so I presume they would be for them as well. And using that digital scan you can make your own competing physical replica. Which is why the museum doesn't really want to make it easy for any 3D printer to compete with them.
Not sure if you are intentionally missing the distinction I’m making? Your comment just restates the GP
I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make, no.
Revenue from “marketing the 3d scans” is not the same as “revenue from selling replicas” and it is the latter that they are trying to protect, not the sale of the scans directly
My impression from that article was that '3D scans' and 'replicas' were grouped together.
Yes, I agree the article very intentionally tries to give that impression, true
Why would they lie about it then? These museums are subsidized by tax payers, not only just local money but often with additional EU funding as well. The scans were paid for by the public. This seems comically evil for no apparent reason.
Bureaucracies always argue for the continuation of the bureaucracy and its funding, no matter how insane or small. It's what they naturally do and you have to explicitly fight against it.
> Why would they lie about it then? T
Because among copyright/IP maximalists, the whole point is that they own an idea or a picture or a look or a fashion and deserve to keep it to themselves forever. It's not a rational attitude, but it's a real one and unfortunately rather common.
And what is the alternative? How do we get it applied to software copyrights?
Flip the script and make everything public unless it has a sort-of "license" which explicitly restricts access. People can proactively restrict access to their work, which would allow for lawsuits, and others can see the potentially very restrictive licenses which some will put on their stuff and possibly learn to avoid such licenses.
Hard to say how that would look or happen in practice but it's interesting to think about.
Although I agree(stuff bought with tax money should go to tax payers), you do realize that many people don't see it that way. Especially when their career rely on withholding the stuff in question.
Another example: if people have access to 3D scans, then they might come to the museum anymore because they can make a virtual tour... (I doubt of that, but well, it's an example)
But, of course, as a tax payer, I wanted these 3D scans (somebody voted for that at some point). So now the pandora's box is open.
The problem, I guess, is that a museum is not there to be profitable. Unfortunately, "modern management" crept in there and now they have to be somehow profitable or at least make an effort to be so. And so, information withholding is a way to achieve that goal.
As a society we have to choose: we keep museums so that everyone can enjoy art, or we think they have to be profitable first...
Maintaining the status quo is almost always the path of least resistance for organizations like this. Saying no to something new is easy, to say yes puts you out on a limb with uncertain strength.
> This seems comically evil for no apparent reason.
Gervais Principle
Devils advocate:
Maybe they were worried about sales of photos of the bust, and other products of the bust but not created using the scans? Could one take all the scans and produce a coffee table book of photos similar to what the gift shops often sell?
Honestly the whole gift shop argument is weird. I have no sympathy for them. You can get plenty of knockoffs now if you wanted: the world is full of Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, Eiffel Tower, etc keychains and trinkets even without scans. Gift shops already have to compete with those.
Approximately no one is going to buy a museum gift shop coffee table book anywhere other than at a museum gift shop.
It seems that with the advent/improvements in AR/VR that measuring the direct sales of scan data is the wrong way to look at the losses.
If many people can experience a 75% compelling viewing of the bust (or the pyramids, Galapagos, Chichen Itza, etc.), the losses in tourism to those sites is far more than the lost sales of scan data.
I doubt it. People go to see the original Mona Lisa when they can own a reproduction for less than the cost of the flight. I don't see why those who would have gone to see it would suddenly accept a reproduction just because it's AR/VR.
There are hundreds of places I’d like to experience in my lifetime. I probably have the time left to go to perhaps 50 of them (max). Surely being able to experience some of those 300 in VR will affect my lifetime travel plans and I highly doubt that I’m alone.
That's my point. Your top 50 are going to stay your top 50. If you've always wanted to see the Mona Lisa in person you're not going to change your plan because you saw an image of it.
My top 50 to see in person would definitely change if 25 of them can be experienced in VR. (I might still go in person to my top 3, but there's a lot of nearly even exchange among spots 4-100.)
This doesn’t seem likely, the major tourist destinations during the busy season are so crowded, or slot limited, that it’s a pretty unpleasant experience.
If anything it would reduce overcrowding .
I very quickly had no sympathy at all with the museum. It obtained funding to do the scans with the express purpose of providing to the public, and then decided not to.
> In an ironic development, the judges specifically reasoned against musée Rodin’s trade secrecy claim by citing its 3D digitization funding applications to the Ministry of Culture, in which the museum stipulated its commitment to publishing its scans. The museum had attempted to hide these funding applications from us and the court, telling the court they did not exist.
In the previous story over the Nefertiti bust, the German museum tried to use this gift shop defense, but then when pressed, you could see that they made almost no money from it.
This the law of unintended consequences in action. I suspect that neither the government nor museums thought there was any legal obligations to make 3D scans public and I'd wager that the legislator did not have that in mind when they drafted the freedom of information laws.
But then, suddenly (as per linked article): "The Commission on Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) ... had never before considered any dispute about 3D scans. It affirmed my request that musée Rodin communicate copies of its scans to me, determining for the first time that public agencies’ 3D scans are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public."
A decision which has been going up the chain of courts since and is apparently close to the possibly dramatic climax.
Indeed, the commercial argument is therefore irrelevant to this and the museum was clutching at straws there, really...
Good laws try to be future-proof. Transparency of government is a big deal in liberal democracies.
It's incongruous for a museum to resist something like this, when exhibiting artifacts to the public is one of the main reasons for their very existence.
Legislators are human beings. "Future-proof" is one thing, guessing all possible cases is quite another and perhaps their aim simply wasn't things like 3D scans at all, as mentioned, because freedom of information laws came about to tackle a completely different issue (which was indeed transparency, not scans of sculptures...)
That's how it is and key to this case, and not really discussed in any comments. I am not commenting on the museum's actions to defend against this, which they must think is in their interest. So I don't understand the hate... it's getting difficult to discuss on more and more topics.
This is utterly puzzling to me.
I just don't understand how you sit on the museums side of the trial on this, without seriously questioning your own position and conceding immediately.
They were basically arguing that they are entitled to hide those scan artifacts to better protect their gift shop?! How can they even reconcile those arguments with preserving the artists legacy/serving the common good?
I'm also surprised at how nonchalantly the french supreme (!!) court seems to cope with the museum just ignoring their two month deadline for three months in the new trial... Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
My conclusion is that there is either pure stubbornness or some weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side, because I have no other explanation why they would fight so hard for their position seemingly against all reason.
> weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side
That's exactly it. I work on a website that makes ancient artefacts accessible. A lot of them are in museums. You wouldn't believe how many museums:
- don't want to show you their archive
- don't want to let you take pictures
- want you to share only low res pictures
- want you to get permission before you can "publish" their artefacts, etc.
It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them.
It's ridiculous. Fortunately, the people working on the website are relentless, and manage to eventually get collection after collection photographed and added mostly by being patient. For some collections it took 20 years before they got access -- but since everyone uses their website, and everyone apart from the local museum director wants the stuff to be in there, eventually they get access to most things.
(Museums in Italy are the worst, allegedly. They really think they own antiquity.)
That is because the stated goal of "preservation" isn't really their goal. Thats only lip-service.
Their actual goal is getting visitors, and any kind of usable information in the form of photos, videos, 3d-scans, transcriptions or whatever leaving their premises is a problem. Add to that the associated huge business of tourism and you have the explanation why the state and the courts (who are usually good buddies with the state and the upper class, including the cultural elite) also don't want to change that status quo.
Ah, the standard Music Industry response to Napster, alive and well decades later.
"Make the information hard to get! We own it!"
Never realizing that sampling of the information makes it just that much more prestigious and desirable to us, the unwashed masses, willing to pay to visit a museum that has AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS.
If you start with the assumption that every view is a lost sale, you're going to have a really bad time.
Outside of the Louvre and maybe the Smithsonian, there are no current world-famous museums, simply regionally or subculture-appreciated museums, some with bygone fame that a small portion of the older population would recognize. The Rodin Museum may be popular among a tiny niche slice of people, but if they were to make an internally consistent strategy that they want growth then they'd release more information.
Actually, imho, the AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS are actually useless. You can not touch them, get close, rotate them, look at them properly, take your time. You are just number 29387 that day visiting the Mona Lisa, you get 5s to view it, then the line moves on.
A high-res photo or 3d-scan allows you to do all those things (maybe except really touching them).
So aside from the emotional benefit of having been near the real original piece for a few seconds, all digital derivatives are logically far better.
When we were there, I took a picture of the Mona Lisa strictly for the crowd in the foreground. To capture the memory of the stupid number of people who seemingly only come to the museum to see that one piece of art.
Then we went and spent a few hours enjoying the rest of the museum, where there is plenty of art I appreciated more.
Five seconds is brutally short.
What painting has the largest area of appreciation, when notoriety or quality is multiplied by time allowed to view it?
Comically, smaller museums generally have a "take a ton of pictures, share them on social, tell everyone" attitude because they want their name out there in order to drive foot traffic and other support.
Trying to pull up the ladder is something people only do once they're on top.
>It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them.
I think people really don't appreciate just how many artifacts museums have that they don't show to the public, don't document, and largely just sit on and gatekeep. It's especially bad when you consider the movement in museum curation from showing large numbers of artifacts with minimal annotation to smaller numbers of highly annotated more "significant" items.
> (Museums in Italy are the worst, allegedly. They really think they own antiquity.)
They are the worst and they do in fact own antiquity: thanks to some idiotic national law, they can claim rights on stuff that has been public domain for centuries before the copyright was even invented. There was a lot of debate about this after a major museum sued a bunch of fashion brands, see this article for example [1].
[1]: https://ial.uk.com/the-perpetual-copyright-protection-of-ita...
> I'm also surprised at how nonchalantly the french supreme (!!) court seems to cope with the museum just ignoring their two month deadline for three months in the new trial...
The conseil d’État is nothing like a Supreme Court. It is an administrative body, not a court of law. This phrase was used because it was easier than explaining how it actually works to a presumably mostly-American audience. France has a civil law system, there cannot be anything like the American Supreme Court.
> Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
It is not a court, and it does not have the powers American judges have. The role of the Council of State (one of them, anyway, and the relevant one here) is to rule on administrative matters. They cannot decide to fine someone or put someone in jail. They can decide that a government body was wrong on something and make it change, that’s it.
Welcome to France! France is built on the idea that the public can't be trusted, has not really reached adulthood (won't ever) and needs to be coached by an army of civil servants whose job is to protect the State and its finances.
It's not corruption, exactly; it's the idea that the interests of the State are paramount, and everything else doesn't really matter.
If the State sells reproductions of Rodin's work, well then you shouldn't be allowed to, and you certainly aren't entitled to any kind of help.
> pure stubbornness or some weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side
Little people fighting for their big egos are far from uncommon in those institutions.
> Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
The French legal system has been under extreme duress over the last decade or so.
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/04/02/justice-la-c...
There is no supreme court in France, this is a gross mistranslation of "Court de Cassation", which is where you bring your case after you have lost your appeal, and is the last court where you can try to argue your point.
You’ve just described precisely what a supreme court is. This is definitely the supreme court of France.
No, it's different in many many ways. And there are not just one, but four courts of last resort in France:
- Cour de Cassation, for civil matters
- Conseil d'État, for matters regarding the administration / the State
- Tribunal des Conflits: tasked with deciding who's right when the Cour de Cassation and the Conseil d'État disagree
- Conseil Constitutionnel: issues rulings about the constitutionality of laws, both new (before they become law) and existing ones (QPC)
This doesn't stop here however; there are two upper courts in the European Union, than can invalidate decisions issued by national courts:
- Court of Justice (in Luxembourg)
- Court of Human Rights (in Strasbourg)
- - -
Edit: Don't you love the idea of "Tribunal des Conflits"? The original idea was that the State could not be brought to court, its decisions being made by "the people" who is the absolute sovereign.
Then France gradually accepted the idea that State's decision could be challenged, and created a whole different judicial system, the "justice administrative". It took a looong time: from 1800 to... 1980. A much simpler approach could have been to let people try their case against the State before the existing courts, but no... much better to build another system with its own rules, its own judges, etc.
An inevitable consequence of having two different systems is that they sometimes disagree. (Another reason why it would have been so much simpler to just have one system.) Since the two systems are sometimes at odds with one another, we created... a third system! This was in 1872, so quite early in the process.
This Tribunal des Conflits is a referee of sorts whose only job is to stop the fights between the two justice systems. I think that's great and tells a lot about the French way of solving problems: just add a new bureaucratic authority on top of all existing ones.
If it's the final court for civil matters in France I would argue it's still a supreme court.
One difference among many: the Cour de Cassation does not issue decisions, exactly; it can only hold or break a decision from a lower court. If it chooses to break the lower court's decision (casser=to break) then the case is sent back to said court to be decided again, with new guidance from the upper court.
The description was incomplete. The cour de cassation is not supreme at all, there are the Constitutional Council and the Court of Justice of the EU above it. As well as more specialised international courts like the European Court of Human Rights. There is a summary here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_of_France .
In any case, France has a civil law system; there cannot be a court as powerful as the Supreme Court of the US is. Viewing any of these institutions as similar to SCOTUS is bound to create a lot of confusion.
"a" vs "the".
"The" supreme court, if one assumes a US-centric definition, comes with a lot of assumptions on the nature of law and the power structure of the various government branches. Which generally do not hold outside of the US and certainly not in France.
So yes, it is "a" supreme court, but that doesn't really help understanding, because it is not "the" supreme court.
Well the SCOTUS functions are divided among the Cour de cassation (last ditch appeal) and the Conseil Constitutionnel (Checks if a law is in line with the constitution)
There a "constitutional counsil" that has old presidents and people named by the french president
Interestingly enough the last three presidents renounced their seats (I don't know why)
Same thing, different name.
Are the Council of State, the Constitutional Council and the Jurisdictional Disputes Tribunal also supreme courts too?
Absolutely not.
So, a supreme court?
Ah non. They are just being french. They don't need reasons.
Excuse my humor. I'm a huge francophile actually.
No need to excuse yourself as a French speaker but not French, the baguettes will indeed unscrupulously bend people over if it serves their own interest without excuses or valid justification.
>They were basically arguing that they are entitled to hide those scan artifacts to better protect their gift shop?! How can they even reconcile those arguments with preserving the artists legacy/serving the common good?
If the museum folds and the collection gets auctioned off in parts and public access to it is reduced then the common good is not served.
I think this is an asinine argument and they're mostly just protecting their own paychecks but there is a kernel of truth to it.
>I'm also surprised at how nonchalantly the french supreme (!!) court seems to cope with the museum just ignoring their two month deadline for three months in the new trial... Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
We all know that justice is only legally blind, not functionally blind. When you're the favorite or you're state adjacent you get a lot more leeway.
One of the things I find really funny about the law is that yeah, just not responding as long as you can or until someone acts to force you to is a common strategy, because it mostly works and adds cost and complexity to holding someone accountable. Some portion of plaintiffs will give up and not pursue even very valid claims if you just make the entire process a slog.
Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. The public can freely access hundreds of scans of classical sculpture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and visitors to the Smithsonian’s website can view, navigate, and freely download thousands of high-quality scans of artifacts ranging from dinosaur fossils to the Apollo 11 space capsule.
Has anyone used these in games? They would be great easter eggs and they have artistry and design that is far beyond almost anything DIY.
> Has anyone used these in games?
No doubt someone has put some of them into games. However, most likely not in it's original shape/form, as the scans usually produce highly inefficiently (but high resolution, great for renders) meshes. The meshes from scans tend to be a mess, and when inserting a 3D model for games, you care a lot about how optimized the meshes are, and that the mesh has a low polygon count as otherwise you'll tank the performance quickly.
So since a developer couldn't just copy-paste the model into the game (requires a prepass to fix issues/optimize before import), it'll take valuable time from other things for just this easter egg. Again, no doubt someone has done this at one point or another, but that's probably why it isn't as common as someone could think.
As an example, take a look at the wireframe of the Rosetta Stone (https://i.imgur.com/rtpiwjZ.png | https://github.com/BritishMuseumDH/rosettaStone/blob/master/...) and you'll see what I mean. For a high quality rock-like object, you'd probably aim for 2000-5000 triangles, while the Rosetta Stone scan seems to have 480,000 triangles straight from the scanning software.
Sadly, it's simply too much detail to be able to import straight up. Luckily, Nanite ("Virtualized Geometry") and similar implementations starts to give us tools so we can stop caring about things like this and let the game engine optimize stuff on the fly.
The published British Museum Rosetta stone is not even what I would consider a high quality scan today. In a proper scan you would be able to easily discern the carved writing just from the geometry. At 1mm faces, it's actually a pretty good candidate to dump straight into UE5 nanite so I disagree fundamentally that it is not able to be used in games. The only real question for the modern developer is whether it makes sense to spend ~50MB budget to put the thing in.
> it's actually a pretty good candidate to dump straight into UE5 nanite so I disagree fundamentally that it is not able to be used in games.
Yeah, obviously the new virtualized geometry approach modern engines are taking kind of make that argument less valid. I thought I was doing a good job ending my comment with mentioning this recent change, but maybe I didn't make it clear enough :)
That makes a lot of sense, thanks.
Still, let's not forget that the detail, the last nuances, is what makes great art so powerful. Lots of people can paint sunflowers or a cathedral (or make a typical computer game).
Working that into a computer game is of course a big practical issue, as you say; also, unless the players will zoom way in for some reason, possibly the maximum effect is a resolution that's still less than what the museums provide. But maybe for the ultimate prize at the end, a close look in the treasure chest, when all the other on-screen action is done? It's hard to provide a visual reward that lives up to the moment, or exceeds it, after 100 hours of play.
so it wouldn't be easy because these scans are highly detailed and so would require too many polygons to be loaded at once
would this remain true for modern higher end graphics cards?
Even modern high end graphics cards use abstractions of the base data to create vast amounts of the final output's fine detail. For example tessellation and other techniques used for complex geometry like compound curves, which allow millions or billions of polygons can be visually simulated without needing to be present as polygon data, increasing opportunity for processing parallelization, while reducing load on communication busses and VRAM.
As an example, you could probably represent something like the grip of this FLIR camera in a couple hundred polygons and surface/curve definitions to help the rendering engine tesselate correctly. On the other hand, this overall scan is 357000 vertexes. Sure you can simplify it and bake a bunch of the texture into a normal map, but that then requires manually reworking the texture map and various other postprocessing steps to avoid creating a glitchy mess.
https://i.imgur.com/aAwoiXU.png
> it wouldn't be easy because these scans are highly detailed and so would require too many polygons to be loaded at once
In practice a a 3d artist could very easily create low poly models for these objects. For that low poly replica the high poly model can serve as a useful reference. (But to be honest many artist can just look at images of the object and do the same.)
This is not even hard, on the order of minutes (for something like the Rosetta Stone) or days (for something seriously detailed).
In this case where there is a will, there is a way. In fact this "reduction" step very often part of the game creation pipeline already. Monsters/characters/objects very often get sculpted at a higher resolution and then those high resolution meshes are reduced down to something more manageable (while they bake the details into a bump map texture, or similar).
Maybe I'm buying into the marketing too much, but it's my understanding that Unreal engine 5 can do this automatically.
Not too much, it does actually work :) The concept is generally called "virtualized geometry" and Unreal's implementation is called "Nanite" but others are starting to pop up too, like the virtualized geometry implementation in Bevy.
For rendering an individual piece, maybe not; but as part of much larger scene with many objects, animation, and rendering effects, it would place an unnecessary burden on the GPU.
It would be much easier to simply have a 3D artist create the object anew from scratch, in a format and resolution that best fits the game.
> but you have to compress the scan
A bit simplified but yeah. In the industry I think it's commonly referred to as "cleaning up the topology" or "simplifying the topology" where "topology" is the structure of the mesh essentially. You'd put the scan/model through something like this: https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/retopologise-3d-scans-...
> is this true with top spec machines too?
Games frequently feature 100s (sometimes 1000s) of models at the same time, so the optimization of each model is important. Take a look at the launch of Cities Skylines 2 for an example of a game that launched without properly optimized 3D models, the performance was absolutely abysmal because the human/resident models were way more detailed than justified for a city simulation game.
Higher end graphics cards probably also mean more detailed scans being available.
Path of Exile has some fountains and sculptures in it that are based on publicaly available scans iirc.
Edit: best source I can find on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPy74M9FNpY&t=690s
and here's one from the Louvre: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/8b6f54/nice_de...
The Louvre sculture is the sort of thing I mean. Wow.
The kind of person who’s good at making games and is excited about ancient artifacts makes their own 3D assets that make the most sense for their game.
> excited about ancient artifacts
It depends what you mean: If you mean, they like the idea of 'ancient' and 'artifacts', they may make up their own. If they like the actual history, then the whole point of the ancient artificats in the museums is that they are actual things from actual ancient civilizations - making something up would defeat the purpose.
Also, as I said, almost certainly they lack the artistry to match what's in the museum, simply because what's in the museum is often the pinnacle of human creativity over millenia.
Potentially cooler than The Teapot, though there are also other considerations I guess...
I've been to an art museum with a large collection of ancient Greek and Egyptian statues. A lot of the statues are damaged, or were painted and the paint has long since worn off.
I'd love to walk through a VR recreation of what they believe the statues looked like when they were new. It balances the need for preservation of what remains, and the need to preserve the subjective interpretation of what the art was meant to be.
> ... are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public.
They can still utterly frustrate you in the way they do this. They could fe print them out layer by layer and only show these in a specific "viewing room". I have seen my government (Belgium) use this strategy when it comes to architectural plans. In essence, it's public (you can access them) but it's also rather useless.
'“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.” '
Do they offer an explanation as to why it’s set up that way?
It seems too comically slow and inconvenient.
I guess they want to limit your time with them. If you could study them whenever you want with whatever tools you have, you can easily find conflicts between the plans and the building regulations. This would allow you to block the planned construction works.
Even with the current protocol people find ways to block "progress". For example, the Oosterweel Link [0], which has been postponed multiple times.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link
I am a French taxpayer.
This is not the most outrageous thing about taxpayer money at work that I learned today.
That would be the fact that local branches of the ministry of agriculture require wind turbine builders to put blue dyed water in concrete to make it friendly to all life or something, I'm not sure I understand, it's called Pneumatit®, and I'm not making this up.
It's biodynamics, it's biogeology (neither biology nor geology, not an actual science, it's more like dowsers). It's not only about wind turbines, it's in so many buildings now, but because it's not only approved but required on some public projects, it's... interesting. It's homeopathy for concrete, and like homeopathy in France, it'll receive government subsidies for far longer than it should.
> It's homeopathy for concrete
you're really not joking
Pneumatit® is a liquid additive that permanently anchors a fine biological activity (liveliness) in the concrete Many people experience adverse effects that come from concrete - regardless of the design. This ranges from slightly subliminal discomfort to irritability, inner cold sensations, joint pain, exhaustion and organic disorders. Underlying such sensations is a reality, because the production of cement breaks through the bottom of the natural processes of life. Result: a lifeless building material with an absorbing effect on our organism [0].
[0] https://www.lehm-laden.de/en_GB/shop/pneumatit-pneumatit-50-...
Oh how I wish I was joking.
This stuff is apparently made from small bird femurs and nautilus shells grounded into powder, then add water, then diluted a million times so that they can sell olympic pools of the thing without running out of raw material. It's textbook homeopathic dilution.
There was an interesting project from the Natural History Museum using a syncatron particle accelerator to 3d scan some part their the famous 300 year old insect collection and make it openly available but that announcement was 2021 and I can't seem to find the results let alone see if they were released to the public.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/july/high-resolutio...
Maybe the delay has been caused by bugs.
I am okay with public information being free to use commercially, with a huge disclaimer though.
Wherever copyright is applicable, the public should retain it, that's what public domain is for. Any derived works, commercial or otherwise should also be in the public domain.
If you fight for "public access" so that you can make your own stuff locked behind a copyright, then you are the hypocrite here.
an interesting example where this has been problematic is OpenStreetMap. They can't ingest a lot of government data b/c their project requires a relicense with their attribution-requirement (where all users are forced to have an ugly OSM bumper sticker on their maps)
What you call an ugly bumper sticker is credit where it is due, but also an important recruitment mechanism for new mappers, which improves the map. The /copyright page is our biggest landing page on the website, even above the base / page. Attribution is also a requirement of many proprietary map providers.
> ugly OSM bumper sticker on their maps
Displaying attribution for free worldwide geodata sounds quite good for me.
FWIW attribution does not have to be big nor on the map, it is just less work to use the default than putting it elsewhere.
Wait, what? If the government source is public domain, OSM (or anyone else) can take it and derive from it and can then impose whatever license OSM wants, including an attribution requirement. Did you mean the other way around?
Actually OSM's license is so weak on the attribution it requires, that OSM does not ingest CC-BY data, because OSM believes their further distribution would not satisfy CC-BY's attribution requirement.
https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_Compatibility
There's nothing to "retain" once copyright is over (aside from moral rights, which are forever... which I guess becomes questionable after the death of the author ? But moral rights are not transferrable anyway).
Instead for calling to basically blow up the whole legal framework around derivative works, maybe we should focus on bringing copyright terms back to more sane durations (like the original 14 years, renewable once) ?
I like the idea of having copyrights renewable indefinitely, but with the holders having to pay exponentially larger sums.
That seems to benefit large corporations at the expense of smaller artists. Either you focus on making money or some large corporation will swoop in the second you can't and exploit your work for their own profit.
Presumably, once the copyright is allowed to expire, it can't be sold and then reinstated.
I'm okay with large corporations pouring their money at the government to keep copyrights for useless things alive, even if it means we can't legally copy useless things for a bit longer.
Wouldn't they then buy it just before expiration ?
Exactly, if the clock is ticking for them to bid on it, to buy it off the small business, it gives the small business power, and should also make it easier for the small business to get decent loans/investments.
Btw, if I'm not mistaken, I first read about this proposal in the book "Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society" by Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...
I love the idea of preserving history through 3D scans. When I learned about Gobekli Tepe a few years ago it caught my heart, and since then I've been wishing that someone would produce a detailed 3D scan of the site. Does anyone know if there's any company, group, or non-profits trying to make this happen for key historical landmarks? Most people are unlikely to be able to visit such locations, and they probably can't handle that many visitors, so making a digital version seems like a great compromise.
Not a non-profit but Ubisoft has been doing significant 3D scanning and sharing (unsure under what license) for their Assassins Creed franchise: https://mocapsolutions.com/blogs/news/assassin-s-creed-unity...
I haven’t played all the games but the recent ones I tried had a historical tour mode where you get to explore day-in-the-life of an Ancient Greek city or Viking village, with people going about their routines working, trading, farming, gathering. With VR it would be the closest thing to time travel we currently have.
And they do have many of the historical landmarks in pretty stunning detail, with drapes and paintings of what it most probably looked like back then.
There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it.
When I see some of the virtual reconstructions of Ancient Rome or Pompeii, I wonder if the real thing will be of less interest than the reconstituted, repaired one.
I think this is normal - there are now billions of people in the world and only so much "great art". I was in a huge crowd looking at the Mona Lisa. There was nothing magical about the experience. I'd rather have my own copy or put my VR glasses on and enjoy it in, say, the house where it was first displayed.
I can see museums fearing the loss of visitors or at least fearing that someone else will make billions out of virtualising it and they won't. I mean, search engines make billions out of the knowledge other people built over centuries. AI takes open source information and code and makes billions selling the embodied knowledge that was given away for free. It's not as if corporations aren't happy to rape the commons and call themselves heroes for doing it.
This isn't a good reason for the museum's attitude but I don't look to the future free exploitation of public information with unalloyed optimism.
> There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it.
For certain things, I could see that. But for many things I go see, it's being there that is part of the point. Knowing that I'm seeing or touching the actual thing the artist saw and touched, or standing in a place where the builders worked build it, etc. Seeing a perfect representation misses that.
I half agree, but I've been to a few of these things and it's all somewhat debatable because you're not really supposed to touch, or there are millions of people and you can't just sit and enjoy, or you don't know enough about them to understand deeply what you are seeing.
Ruined cities really don't look or feel anything like what they were. You miss an incredible amount by not being able to see them as the inhabitants would have. On the other hand you see the countryside and when that hasn't changed (e.g. the sea moving out) you get a feeling of context but .... even that is odd when the original people that lived there are long gone and a totally different culture has supplanted them. You smell the smells of the plants at least and that's good.
OTOH I can imagine the virtual part of this becoming incredibly good - with smell and touch even. Imagine lying in your Roman house in Pompeii and eating dinner while reclining. Listening to the street noise outside while enjoying the garden in your courtyard? I can imagine putting yourself inside the historical context to a degree that would require an extreme feat of imagination in the real place.
With paintings it's just the crowd, often being on your feet and the comical way in which one's favorite painting turns out to be tiny in real life and much worse than the print for that reason.
> Ruined cities really don't look or feel anything like what they were. You miss an incredible amount by not being able to see them as the inhabitants would have.
Oh I totally agree with this! And I'd say it applies similarly to modern cities. I find it sort of hilarious to go somewhere like London which has a huge amount of historical architecture, but so surrounded by modernity that you get a little whiplash every time you turn around.
I have to get as close as I can to what I'm looking at, preferably close enough to mostly shut out the existence of everyone around, the noise, etc.
I think you make very good points. I would love the virtual experience that tried to show what it was really like at the time these artifacts were created. I'd still enjoy the part about seeing it all in person, though, because that's just me -- being in the presence of the physical object really sparks my imagination. So ... I want both options, please.
It probably depends a lot on personality. For myself, I obsessively studied space exploration history as a child. When I was much older, I toured National Air and Space Museum in District of Columbia and found it terribly boring, no new knowledge, nothing I hadn't read about before.
I can see your point of view. It definitely is going to depend on what you are going for. I've never gone to a museum for knowledge. I enjoyed the Smithsonian (though, aside from a few specific artifacts, I really prefer Udvar-Hazy to the museum on the mall) solely because of the feeling I got being in the presence of the actual machines that I've learned so much about. Reading about Glamorous Glennis or the Enola Gay is one thing, but to stand in front of it and think "that right there is the actual plane Chuck Yeager flew past mach 1" is 100% of why I go to the museum.
I love this and applaud it.
It's also very timely: next week I have arriving a portable 3D scanner (an Einstar Vega) precisely because as a hobbyist sculptor the only way I can analyze these works to inform my practice is to go to galleries and scan the works myself (sometimes very surreptitiously!). It's crazy that I need to buy a £2000 piece of equipment and produce have a tonne of CO2 just to be able to look at a piece of art from x00 years ago on my computer.
Bravo.
Photogrammetry is well established and you can do that with any camera and a few hours of cpu time.
Photogrammetry is great with textured, consistently lit, opaque objects.
Blank white plaster, less so. You really want some kind of microtexture to grab on to for it to be anywhere close to a structured light scanner. That may mean you want a macro lens and a thousand exposures because you're grabbing on to microscopic surface roughness or dust. Not necessarily easy to do surreptitiously.
Yes they are different things and photogrammetry isn't a replacement for a "real" 3d scanner. But this is about museums which largely aren't unlit plain white surfaces. Getting models of museum objects is generally doable by anyone without thousands in specialised equipment. Taking a video or pictures is a lot less weird than pulling out any scanner.
Why exactly is non-commercial open access problematic?
I think the author is going overboard by framing this as some kind of righteous crusade for the public access. After all, he is interested in making profit from this. Sure, public funding paid for it, so then why should the profits be privatized?
There is no privatization here (moving the scans from public domain to private), the author is seeking the opposite, shifting the scans to the public unencumbered.
Yes, to be commercialized and privatized by the author. Somehow all of the "open access projects" on the authors website seem to be concerned with releasing 3D models scanned by others, and not you know, his own projects. I don't see any commitments to publish derived work and such.
I know that the story of an independent artist fighting a big bureaucratic public institutions is something that would get a lot of sympathy here, but this really isn't that much of a "David and Goliath" kind of tale. French heritage and research entities are underfunded and understaffed, they don't have competent lawyers, or indeed funding to afford those, as we can clearly see from this case. One litigation-happy American can run circles around them and profit from it too.
If as soon as the heritage work gets 3D scanned with French public funds, it will immediately get scooped and monetized by private sector, wouldn't the ultimate outcome be that less objects get scanned? Why would the museums even bother fighting for the digitization grant funds?
Great read and an important battle for an open society.
It strongly reminds me of universities and their model to sell papers to the public after the public already paid for their creation. Hopefully this ruling will somehow help in that regard to open up publicly funded work.
> ...I approached musée Rodin with a strategy to illicit a full airing...
Minor typo: if the author or anyone who knows him is reading this, the word wanted there probably is elicit.
That jumped out to me as well, particularly given the otherwise high quality of the writing. It's an example of what I perceive as a more general phenomenon - spelling errors, particularly confusion of uncommon homonyms[note], appear to have increased in frequency. I previously attributed it to the internet simply lowering the bar for "publishing" to the less educated, and the greater proportion of text that makes it to our eyeballs without the intercession of an editor - but seeing such a glaring mistake in a text clearly written by someone with otherwise very good command of the language makes me wonder if there are other factors, perhaps the rise of verbal media such as audiobooks, podcasts, and YouTube channels.
[note: I see "fazed" spelled as "phased" more often than I see it spelled correctly now. I suspect its proper spelling will eventually die out.]
or speech-to-text systems. The person might not be typing the text.
It has taken me a long time to let go of "to beg the question" as exclusively meaning "to employ circular reasoning" and not cringe when I see it used to mean "to raise the question".
What gave me calm to accept such changes is understanding that the language we use today is a result of such changes. Awful once meant full of awe and now means very bad or unpleasant. Nice no longer means foolish and now means pleasant. Girl referred to a young person of either gender and now specifically means a female child. Silly once meant happy or fortunate and now means foolish or absurd. Meat once referred to food of all kinds, not just animal flesh. I imagine there were people who experienced these changes with some despair. But everything's okay. English is still expressive and meaningful. The sky has not fallen. The center holds.
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558805
(Same person, same topic, different materials; this is the article about the bust of Nefertiti linked in the piece.)
also very interesting
I suspect the true rationale may be more deeply based on art history than either the museum or this article are letting on. To understand why, I think it's important to reckon with what happened to "art" as an institution when the processes of reproduction became cheap and readily available during the 1900s. I can only sketch and I won't fully do it justice.
Before the 1900s, some methods of mechanical reproduction did exist. These methods could be used to mechanically reproduce the written word and very specific forms of visual media. But one factor governed the creation of reproducible works: the work had to be made in a format that permitted reproduction. Put another way, the author of a work must have designed their work for reproduction, implicitly or explicitly consenting to it.
For example, a Japanese wood block carver chooses to make a wood block rather than draw directly on the page; this deliberate choice creates the means of mechanical reproduction. Even when this is done, the choice to do so often comes at prohibitive cost, and while the cost of reproduction is reduced, it remains nontrivial.
But for the rest of art and artists, exclusivity was not just implied, it was an expected standard. There is only one Mona Lisa. It was made in so-and-so year by so-and-so. Around this grew a nearly occult tradition of reverence for the individual, as expressed through their work - their true work, the one in front of you, unique and inviolable.
Through the 1900s artists were reckoning with the creation of film, and later, digital media. I won't rehash all these arguments. Suffice it to say that one main challenge was to the ethos of art itself. If the work is infinitely reproducible, then where has the artist gone? Today, anyone who wants to see the Mona Lisa has already done so. The original is a mere novelty, except to certain very rare specialists. This has only grown more true with digital media, as the ease of reproduction and fidelity have both increased dramatically.
Among a certain type of art culture enthusiast, or maybe dogmatist, there remains a belief that art has lost something material as a result of its reproducibility. And it is undeniably a reasonable belief that if people are provided the requisite data, they will, eventually, reproduce the artwork to a satisfactory degree.
To many of these people, call them any jeers you want, sculpture remains one of the last bastions where the occult value surrounding the artist, who made the work, has not been diminished, because no one has yet figured out how to mechanically reproduce a sculpture to a high degree of fidelity.
Certain museums hold this as a guiding principle, because it is their interpretation of what "art" is supposed to culturally mean. A 3D scan of a sculpture destroys that final bastion of sanctity against the oncoming tide of reproducible devaluation.
Now, I don't believe this argument is a good one. Frankly I think it's a bit Pollyanna, but I have to acknowledge I set it up so I could be strawmanning it a bit. But the reason we're not likely to hear it here is because, despite (what I suspect to be) its central importance to the Rodin, it is not, at its core, a legitimate legal argument.
Bon courage. I hope you get these hypocrites through. Do you have a foundation to raise money for lawyers?
"In response to the museum’s nonsensical technological claims, we submitted expert testimony from Professor Michael Kazhdan, full professor of computer graphics in the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and co-developer of the Poisson Surface Reconstruction algorithm, which is used worldwide in 3D scan data analysis. Professor Kazhdan explained to the court that documents in plaintext format are fundamentally well suited for preserving scan data, and that such documents are easily exploitable by experts and amateurs alike."
Yes. Yes. That must've felt satisfying.
"In response to Musee Rodin's nonsense, we present here the inventor of the basic techniques of 3D scanning, Dr. Kazhdan, from John Hopkins..."
Reminds me of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall scene „If Life Were Only Like This“:
https://youtu.be/vTSmbMm7MDg
It's pretty much that!
"Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here...
What I feel about this is similar to what I feel about government-sponsored research institutes and universities not releasing their research to the public...
If you get money from the government, society is paying for your work so it's entitled to it.
Oh, you want to keep the data for yourself? DON'T ask or accept money from us the people.
> in private, RMN admits it won’t release its scans because it wants to protect its gift shops’ sales revenue from competition from the public making their own replicas.
Sounds like a pretty good reason
The article is long, but from TFA
The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position...
As if it would be more difficult to just buy the thing from the gift shop and make copies of that. With a physical object you can make molds directly from that without having to figure out how to turn a point-cloud file into a physical object.
It's a pretty bad argument even besides the lack of legal relevance.
Understandable perhaps, "good" enough to completely ignore copyright law, no.
What copyright law? If I possess an out-of-copyright document, nothing requires me to make a copy for you when you ask me.
They're ignoring the French freedom-of-information law; copyright law doesn't even touch the issue.
My point, perhaps badly made, was that copyright law has expired, therefore it should be in the public domain.
Being in the public domain doesn't mean someone has to give you a copy.
No, that's why the author is using freedom of information laws to accomplish his goals. If you are a government institution - and these museums are - in a country with freedom of information laws, then it follows that you can be compelled to comply with them by the courts.
Except it turns out they also make basically no money from this right now - it's not a meaningful portion of their funding or other monetary support.
This is actually true of most large art museums. SF MoMa makes only 7% of revenue (not actual dollars in funding) from their gift shop and that number only goes in one direction over the years.
Smaller art museums often depend more but that is also changing.
So It's just another nonsense argument
It's also an argument, that even if you granted all there premises - could be quantifiable.
If the gift shop makes $x per year in toto, and some percentage is (or could be) 3D scans, you now have a maximum dollar amount that they can possibly be worth (by calculating the cost of a perpetual annuity). Can't be more - and so even in the worst case you've changed it from a "we will never" to a "we want $x before we do" question.
Data *should* be free, but in an age where predatory corps crawl the web to train models they hide behind paywalls, having control over your data means being able to explicitly give them to those that serve the common good.
I used to be sympathetic to causes such as this, but in the advent of the plunder of our digital cultural heritage I have become skeptical.
Why should proprietary AI get data payed for by the french tax payer?
That's the thing, this data is in public domain, since Rodin died a long long time ago.
States do a lot of things with taxes that benefit commercial interests. Why should this data be an exception?
Just regulate AI, don’t mess with freedom because some abuse it.