Official scan of Bust of Nefertiti released after three years of stonewalling | Hacker News Reader

Official scan of Bust of Nefertiti released after three years of stonewalling

reason.com

46 pointsthaumasiotes13 comments

I have friends who work for WilmerHale. The SPK likely spent more than the €5 000 they'd taken in on the scan on the legal fees alone.

It's a shame to read this because the SPK does support good scholarship (I own a number of their publications) but Germany in particular seems to have a tight-fisted zero-sum view of copyright. And these kinds of games, where they say "yes we know we have to follow the law but we don't feel like it" are surprisingly common in both German and France.

Not just Germany and France. It's surprisingly prevalent in the UK too.

Many of the big and well known museums have their most famous exhibits stolen or “bought”. These global heritage artifacts are kept under closed doors to generate revenue for the museums and not returned to the countries they originated from. The least they could do is to provide high resolution/detail digital scans freely available to everyone.

It's hilarious to me they're claiming copyright over it. The original copyright holder, Nefertiti, died over three millennia ago, and she sure as shit wouldn't have transferred the copyright to the German government.

I wonder if their copyright claim has any relevance to the ongoing demands for repatriation to Egypt. If the German government claims copyright, certainly the Egyptian government has a better copyright claim. There's probably some sort of legal gotcha! in there but I don't know what it is.

Certainly the fact that the German government is claiming copyright protection for a 3,000 year old Egyptian artifact they stole 80 years ago should clue us in that copyright law is fucking broken.

I wonder if their argument is somewhat similar to the "database right" - the common example being a telephone directory. There's no copyright in the mapping between names and phone numbers, but there is in the specific database of them. (IANAL, don't take this as gospel!)

So while the original artefact may be long out of copyright, are they under the impression that their scan is somehow a new work or some kind of copyrightable derivative?

I do love the way this came about -- first an bland statement that they derive profit from licensing, followed by (legitimately) asking for the data to support that claim under FOIA. Fantastic!

A telephone directory is the standard example (in the US) of a work in which there is no intellectual property right at all. Are you thinking of something else, or perhaps a different country?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

Reading the wikipedia summary, it looks like the key points of the decision are:

- The association between an individual phone number and an individual name is an uncopyrightable fact.

- A collection of uncopyrightable facts may nevertheless be copyrightable, given the editorial creativity involved in compiling those facts.

- But the phone book involves no editorial discretion whatever; it is a list of every subscriber to the company (no discretion over what data is or isn't included), in alphabetical order (no discretion over what order the data is presented in), which the company is legally required to produce.

I think I've picked a bad example!

I was thinking along the same lines you explained -- that the facts wouldn't be copyrightable, but the overall work might be.

To that effect - the scan produces a point-cloud. If you repeated the scan, you'd get almost the same point-cloud. Thus, the point-cloud is a fact.

But the process of taking that point cloud produces a work, given the creativity involved in cleaning it up and checking accuracy, then making it into a model fit for release.

I was under the impression that the phone book's appearance and layout might be copyrightable (trade dress/look and feel), though that's more likely a trademark issue than a copyright one.

> given the creativity involved in cleaning it up and checking accuracy

This opinion isn't informed by anything, but I feel like the more effort you put into making sure your point cloud is accurate, the more fact-like and therefore uncopyrightable the point cloud becomes.

Don't I own the copyright for something if I buy it? So, 'stolen 80 years ago' aside, as long as the German govt owns it, they have the current copyrights?

No, you buy the chattel property right in the manifestation itself, but not copyright. Even if that is an original work. Unless copyright is specifically conveyed.

That is, the copyright in, say, a book, and the original manuscript of a book itself, are two separate legal entities. You might own the copyright and not the manuscript, or the manuscript and not the copyright, or both, or neither.

Once the copyright itself has expired, you could own the manuscript itself, and use that to produce copies. But there is no longer an exclusive right to make those copies, so there is no copyright to be owned.

(General case, specific law may vary by country.)

Linked[×] via that article is a similar story of obtaining access to the official scan of Rodin's Thinker. It's an interesting tale told in the form of email and official letters...

[×] https://cosmowenman.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/20190911-cos...

There’s so much data that could benefit the public that is hidden away it’s mind boggling

> SPK confirmed it had earned less than 5,000 euro, total, from marketing the Nefertiti scan, or any other scan for that matter.

This is a fundamental issue in NGO's

They are there, in theory for humankind. But they are staffed by humans who are there to justify their wage.

This is not a small thing, NGO's spend their days re inventing a broken wheel because no one will share.

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