The Berlin Egyptian Museum’s scan of the Bust of Nefertiti (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The Berlin Egyptian Museum’s scan of the Bust of Nefertiti (2017)

reason.com

124 pointsTomte39 comments

I have some experience with bringing museum exhibits online, and unfortunately this experience is total standard.

Museums think they own their artefacts, and they want to control who gets to "publish" them. Typically museums have a few archaeologists that they have close ties with who get the privilege of publishing stuff. If some random person comes along, god forbid from abroad, they will try everything to stop you from getting access to their collection.

They often don't even have time to publish their stuff, so many museums have unpublished objects in storage that noone knows about and they more or less keep secret because they want to decide who gets to publish them.

This fiefdom affects big and small museums alike.

One tactic that occasionally works is to get some important institution or some well connected professor to contact the director of the museum and sweet-talk to them to give you access.

Interesting.

This jibes with stories my father told me about how he and his brothers found Indian burial sites and other Indian artifacts in upstate New York when he was a kid/teen. He must have found thousands of arrowheads over the years (tilled farmland brought them to the surface). I found a few walking the fields with him as a kid myself.

Anyhow he said the burial site was a major find and they knew it, and so they contacted the museum of Rochester or something, which came in much took ownership of everything, including all credit for the discovery, then hid the artifacts away, etc. He didn't have anything nice to say about his dealings with them, the experience majorly disappointed him, as he believed this stuff was meant for the public consumption but in the end was just hidden away.

aka nepotism

Yep, I work in this area and museums/libraries often believe that they have the right to prevent you from using the creative works whose originals they physically hold. This is usually not the case. And in the vast majority of countries, digitizations of at least 2D works aren't able to be copyrighted.

Exactly. You can go into a museum, take a photo, and do with it whatever you want, legally, even though the museum usually claims that you need their permission to publish it.

The problem is of course that you can't take photos of stuff that isn't exhibited, so you need to get their permission to check out the stuff in the basement.

Europe actually does have a few countries that claim that photographing or digitizing a public domain work recopyrights it. They also have neighboring rights and database rights regimes on top of that.

If you wanna know more, you should look at the one time the National Portrait Gallery threatened to sue Wikimedia[0] for having an archive of uncopyrighted material. It went nowhere - primarily because the US has soundly and firmly rejected the nonsense that "sweat of the brow" creates copyright. Hell, even the EU doesn't think you can recopyright public domain works this way. But the UK-hosted NPG is still asserting primacy of UK law over the whole Internet to this day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...

Many institutions in the UK and elsewhere claim this. But that doesn't make it true.

The threshold of originality is historically signficiantly higher throughout most of continental Europe than in the UK. The 2001 Infopaq case also has relevance in the UK. The UK IPO indicated that based on this decision (binding in the UK) and other factors these images likely shouldn't have copyright even in the UK.

The 2019 EU copyright directive also explicitly included the provision that 2D replicas are not eligible for any new copyright (Art. 14). This is not directly relevant in the UK (though previous CJEU decisions remain effective there), but it does apply throughout the EU.

In short, the NPG doesn't decide what UK law says. Many people have claimed that scans and reproductions are worth copyright but in the vast majority of cases this is legally incorrect.

In the United States, there is case law[1] establishing that an exact replica of artwork that is itself in public domain is not eligible for copyright protection, because "originality" is a necessary element for copyright protection to exist. Works that lack any originality are therefore public domain even if they require effort or technical skill to produce, such as photographing a public domain painting, or presumably scanning a public domain bust.

Is there any similar law or regulation in Germany?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....

Ah but you see it’s not an exact replica they carved a copyright notice and their name on the bottom! Clearly that qualifies it for the copyright notice itself.

Technically correct - but if you remove the copyright notice then it becomes public domain again.

I had a chance to go through the author's website [0], and it's quite the pleasure! I've always been bit of a historical art nerd, so to know that I can have my own little 3d scans of such amazing pieces of history gives me immense joy.

On other news, now that 3D scanning is becoming pretty commonplace with the iPhone pro LiDAR and apps like [1] or [2], I wonder how long such protests by museums will last before they have to relent as 3d scanning becomes as commonplace as taking pictures of artwork in the museums.

[0] https://cosmowenman.com/ [1] https://hege.sh/ [2] https://record3d.app/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26935781

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558805

3D stl model @ Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/NefertitiHack3D

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

What the “Nefertiti Hack” Tells Us About Digital Colonialism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978089 - Oct 2021 (2 comments)

A Museum Tried to Hide This 3D Scan of an Iconic Egyptian Artifact. (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26935781 - April 2021 (4 comments)

The Neues Museum claims copyright over 3D-printing files of the Nefertiti bust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670786 - Nov 2019 (92 comments)

Official scan of Bust of Nefertiti released after three years of stonewalling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558805 - Nov 2019 (13 comments)

The Making of Nefertiti 1kb (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18869904 - Jan 2019 (20 comments)

There’s Something Fishy About the Other Nefertiti - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11238921 - March 2016 (91 comments)

Artists Covertly Scan Bust of Nefertiti and Release the Data for Free Online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11141840 - Feb 2016 (84 comments)

Feel free to delete my comment you replied to (with yours superseding it) as well as this one, and take the archive org link for your own comment if desired. Merry Christmas! Thank you!

I remember this. Before the files were released, I seem to recall that there were some people who surreptitiously got some scanning equipment into the museum and scanned the artifact without permission, and published the result:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:d86dc5d56479a89074af1c3365a3b7d3d1404fb2&dn=NefertitiHack3D.stl

Apparently, the author of this article believes that story was a hoax, source [0]. Reading his arguments, I am also inclined to believe the same.

[0] https://cosmowenman.com/2016/03/08/the-nefertiti-3d-scan-hei...

Is there any statement of the museum which explains *why* they were being this obnoxious?

Found one, unfortunately it's in German only:

https://www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de/en/news-detail/arti...

Two arguments:

We never intended the scanned data to be a "product", but simply created it as an intermediate step in the masking process.

Also, the taxpayer expects us to alleviate his burden by trying to make at least some money, and the FOIA requestor declined to promise non-commercial use.

"the taxpayer expects us to alleviate his burden by trying to make at least some money, and the FOIA requestor declined to promise non-commercial use. "

Yes and the taxpayers will be happy, that they hired one of the most expensive law firms, to protect their amazing 5000 euro revenue.

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

"Instead, SPK made arrangements for me to inspect the scan at the Los Angeles office of the law firm WilmerHale, one of the most expensive, well-connected law firms in the world."

I wonder if a FOIA would show the lawyers cost more than the revenue?

Before it was already freely available, but only for research and non-commercial use.

"Freely available" 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 presume.

Any statement would likely just contain polite lies. The concept of open access to things created with public money is not really a thing in Germany (I believe it is in the US?) and many agencies will fight it on pure principle.

I have published a book which required many photos of famous paintings. The paintings themselves were no longer covered by copyright, but the photos of the paintings were. In the end I had to swop out half of them for cc images, in some cases of different paintings.

If you want to see lots of freely available scanned artifacts, check out scan the world.

https://www.myminifactory.com/scantheworld/full-collection

I love the bust of Nefertiti. Not just for what it is, but for how it shows how fucking ridiculous it is when researchers detect pigment on marble statues and then restore them with absurd flat pastels like a grade schooler in MS Paint.

I remember trying to photograph the real bust (no flash of course) and a guard stepping in the way telling me it's prohibited.

That’s funny: I remember seeing it in the mid-to-late 90s and being amazed at how lax the security was. I took several pics and walked all around it.

When was this, I wonder? I definitely was able to take pictures when I visited in 2019.

Might depend on the person watching it, as museums tend to go... I witnessed someone nearly being ejected from the vatican museum recently, when they were visibly but not disrespectfully amused about a painting that was clearly made to elicit that response. Another person tried to take a picture and had to give their phone to the guard, who then proceeded to delete it and check if they took any others. I would've loved to watch that room for a while longer to see what else that guy was up to.

I was once forbidden to even draw in an art museum. I thought it was some mistake, an over zealous interpretation of the law. But the museum director herself confirmed it. Still can’t believe it.

fantastic work. Wishing the best of success with the author's investigations into other museums as well.

This is great! Has it been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons yet?

Commons does not permit works that have the NC restriction.

Commons does, however, allow scans of 2D public domain works that have "scarecrow" copyright claims in light of Bridgeman v. Corel (which ruled that such scans/photos can have no copyright in the US due to a lack of original creative content).

Commons doesn't accept 2D photos of 3D works because these photos' lighting, positioning, etc. choices can give them original creative content. But a 3D scan isn't likely to contain such creative choices. It may be annoying to make one, but the US does not have "sweat of the brow" copyright.

The Nefertiti Bust is a 3D work, and as you can see yourself, its scans are not available on Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nefertiti_Bust

To be clear, I think the copyright claims are bullshit and it totally should be there, but Commons is very, very conservative in what it allows.

It's a rare scenario not generally considered by PD-Art on Commons. Commons isn't actually that conservative (except in that they demand the work be free in both its country of origin and the US). Commons has very few 3D models in general though not for copyright reasons.

See John Oliver about Museums.

Museums: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Where is the jail time for the apparatchiks who perpetrated this nonsense on the side of the museum?!

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