Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict
cosmowenman.substack.com
cosmowenman.substack.com
The originals created by Rodin were clay models, from which plaster molds were made. Those were used to cast bronzes. Not just one bronze copy, many copies. There are at least 23 copies of "The Thinker" cast during Rodin's lifetime, and even more later copies.[1]
In the SF Bay Area, the Palace of the Legion of Honor has one. One of the point clouds shown is of Rodin's "Gates of Hell", and a copy of that can be seen outside the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, which has a small garden of Rodin bronzes. So if you really need a 3D scan, there are lots of bronzes available to scan.
What scares the Rodin Museum is that they are still selling reproductions.[2] Resin copies are available through the gift shop, and bronze copies can be ordered. They have a complicated argument about "moral rights" to justify their monopoly which is marginal at this late date. (Rodin died in 1917.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Thinker_sculptures
[2] https://boutique.musee-rodin.fr/en/10-sculpture-reproduction...
No, what scares them is the idea that someone else might view their artwork without visiting their museum. Revenue from the gift shop doesn't enter into it at all.
Ask if, since they used public money to create these, what public benefit was produced by it.
If you can have them admit, or can prove, no public benefit, it's misspent public funds.
If it's misspent public funds then its public reimbursement at the least for all the works they have scanned as a minimal response.
You could argue the case the directors are liable for incompetence, or possibly criminality for knowingly misappropriating the public funds or contempt of court for earlier cases.
When faced with this as a more serious charge, the museum may then choose to simply release the documents to settle the case. You may not even have to prove anything.
IANAL but have been involved in (other country) public council appeals.
Whilst I think on balance the scans should be public; it is more important that the FOI laws strike a perfect balance of enabling efficient administration whilst shinning enough light to reduce corruption.
I would not want museums to be reluctant to create scans and archives that compromise their short term funding models if they are useful for conservation.
To say they are useful for conservation is to say it's for the public, there is afaics no separation of concerns here unless you're arguing the museum should act a private collector in its conservation?
To counterpoint your next argument that the conservation using this material must be handled by specialists, yes it should, if they were casts of bones etc and are themselves genuinely rare and difficult to replicate.
Digital goods are only rare by virtue of the body holding them not making copies... By acting in a private capacity.
Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…
I read it like this: the museum wanted to safely preserve the original so they made a digital copy and hid it in a drawer. The author pointed out this was not lawful, and the museum panicked because they intended it as a digital copy protected similarly to the original. So, commendations to the appeals court for identifying the key philosophical issue; regrets that they ignored the actual law.
What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.
What's the law like on photographs? Those are effectively equivalent are they not? Or does the entire argument hinge on the fact that point clouds can be stored in a human readable format?
You're badly confused. The scans are not a financial asset, and they don't even try to make money on them.
From Cosmo Wenman's earlier exploits:
> In August 2016, with the help of the Berlin-based attorney and law professor Kristoff Ritlewski, I sent the Egyptian Museum a request for the scan, citing German freedom of information laws
> The museum quickly referred the matter to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's state museums. The foundation—known in German as the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK)—is one of the largest cultural organizations in the world. When it received my records request, it acknowledged the existence of the Nefertiti scan and acknowledged that the organization was required by law to give me access to it. But it also declared that directly giving me copies of the scan data would threaten its commercial interests. The Egyptian Museum sells expensive Nefertiti replicas in its gift shop, and it implied that it needs to protect that revenue to finance its ongoing digitization efforts.
> In museum-world parlance, this argument against open access is known as "the gift shop defense."
> I asked them to reconsider their position, and to prioritize the benefits to the public of open access over gift shop revenue.
> I also made a new freedom of information request, this time for info about that revenue. I asked for records of their revenue from the sales of replicas of any artifacts, including the Bust of Nefertiti, that were derived from their scans. I asked for records of revenue from the licensing of any of their scan data to third parties. And I asked for any records that demonstrated how that revenue was directed to digitization projects. Finally, I asked them if they would accept a financial donation in exchange for making their Nefertiti data freely available to the public and, if so, what their price was.
> SPK's response, five months later, was revealing.
> 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.
( https://reason.com/2019/11/13/a-german-museum-tried-to-hide-... )
>reclassified point clouds as non-document materialast
Just "emboss" the text into 3D space, write that to a 3D file, and voila no more pesky fourth estate oversight! Watergate, eat your heart out...
It comes off a little bit like they made a lazy decision at the outset, didn't want to reverse course to save face and knew they didn't need to back it up with anything....
Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.
There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.
It may have been a mistake to phrase the FOIA process to the affected bodies as "you must share" rather than "you now have the tools and process to share".
I remember in college my art history professor had a personal digital collection of high quality scans that he'd procure somehow that were impossible to find online. The data seems to be highly guarded, I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise
So my impression is that the Rodin Museum is not really the exception here
A frequent topic of discussion is how hard it can be to get things on display. Many people in museum related roles view their job first as protecting and preserving the displays at all costs, with presenting them to the public as an unfortunate necessity that they’re forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who don’t want the best or most valuable works to be put on display or loan because that risks damaging them.
I would have thought that high resolution copies and archives of art would be a dream come true for these people, but from what I’ve observed many of them oppose that as well. They feel it provides an inauthentic or incomplete sense of their valued works, while also diminishing their profession of preserving these items. When you view yourself as the gatekeeper for a special, irreplaceable treasure, anything that produces a facsimile of that treasure is an abomination that must be resisted.
Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.
Nietzsche said that the priests are the enemies, and I'm starting to think he was on to something.
Their purpose is not to display the artwork and sharing the scans would take away from their purpose. If other people are already preserving the artwork, they have no need for you to do it too.
Sibling comment gets at the detail better, but it seems museums have dual roles: display some works for the public and preserve a much greater archive of work for progeny (?).
The public interest in viewing stuff doesn’t sound like it gets nearly the cachet as being ones who get to actually be close to the works.
FWIW, this sounds somewhat similar to ROM or many other digital “rarity” communities online.
I remember this happening in the Dave Matthews Band online community in the aughts (oddly specific but yes people with recordings that led to say the full leak of what became Busted Stuff) or to be one of the few who had heard a copy of “Build you a house.”
More recently I saw evidence of hoarding / gatekeeping in leaks of clean (master?) individual tracks from studio recordings of major artists.
I seem to remember celerity photo leak scandals that began as some kind of insiders only type thing.
I mention these examples because the human condition to hoard or derive power over the control of content is not unique to museum administrators.
That said, physical copies of rare human art are undoubtedly worth protecting.
However, I find the protection of digital descriptions of the works, especially given comment that they are likely not even unique, galling and not dissimilar to all the gate keeping examples I provided above.
Just guessing but museums are always fund-raising through grants and looking for ways to expand their mission and justify larger budgets. Digital preservation through new 3D scanning technology seems like ideal grant-fodder.
At the time, the thought they could be compelled through FOI to provide the scan data to the masses who pay their salaries probably never occured to them. Instead of seeing the scans as an opportunity to share the museum's collection more widely (supposedly a core part of their educational mission), they see them as a threat to their defacto monopoly.
https://youtu.be/OQiQk8AJ0YI?is=Wiwxeok0Hg4jMdJu
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a few artists whose works are somewhat belittled by being digitized and viewed on a screen: Monet and Rothko. Both have monumental size paintings that really don’t work if you aren’t there in person. But since the only way most people interact with them is via a screen, they are often criticized (Rothko specifically.)
So in other words, some art necessarily has a physical dimension which cannot be appreciated in a non-physical way.
Lynch also wasn’t talking about only his movies, he was talking about cinema as a whole.
Of course, reproductions are how basically how all of his statues we see today were made anyway, using and scaling up the clay sculptures. The musee rodin still makes authorized “original” reproductions, up to 12 can be called original. These are authorized by the musee rodin, and account for 30-45 percent of their annual budget.
So a perfect point cloud could be used to make your own molds, and from their your own bronze statues. I wouldn’t call it “counterfeit” because that’s basically how they were done even back in the day, and why there are many “authentic/original/authorised” Thinkers/etc across the world.
Probably at some point walking around with an iPhone will be good enough to make a near indistinguishable point cloud, so the result of this legal process could be kinda moot unless they stop folks from using iPhones near the statues all over the world.
https://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/museum/institution/self-fundin...
Museums want to prevent that and also ensure their own existence.
PS: in this specific case, the museum has to worry about counterfeit copies of Rodin works as well. But I don’t want to succulents on that as I don’t know the details.
“FOI is for administrative documents to increase transparency in government. Detailed 3D scans a museum does for research or preservation isn't an administrative document.
If you want a 3d scan of these statues, there's a lot of them around in scannable places like parks etc. If you just want to win, you're wasting everyone's time for no good reason.”
To put it differently, imagine the museum trained a RodinGPT on artworks and other data. The activist now bases his claim to the model on the fact that the model is a document.
I don’t want to freak the museum out but I have 360 degree footage of large sections of the museum (mostly for a spatial index) and now I’m wondering how high a quality I could get with splatting the sculptures and making it public.
Would I get cease desisted for hosting from across the pond? Or would they be too lazy to come after me?
I’m open to ideas but I don’t see how they could screw you if they’re your own scans. They can’t copyright stolen artifacts from other countries, so they can’t get you on copyright. It’s not their files, so they can’t get you on piracy.
Do it.
While the museum may have some looted items anyway, I thought this is about Rodin's art, i.e. items from Rodin's own collection and studio, or perhaps casts made by the museum. Discussion about looted items seems off topic.
I’d spend a while thinking about it but I know what my immediate impulse would be.
If you want a 3d scan of these statues, there's a lot of them around in scannable places like parks etc. If you just want to win, you're wasting everyone's time for no good reason.
I hope La Quadrature and company appeal this refusal to the EU.
Also even without the context above, a museum preventing people from experiencing and studying items from its collection (since the point clouds were apparently ruled such) is enough of a grounds for activist action against them.
Generally a public preservation grant will have conditions, especially if EU funded (not mentioned but well likely as EU finances huge digitalisation efforts).
I'm surprised the author does not mention these grant documents which financed the digitalisation. I would expect these to have provisions on sharing/making available/publication. If they do you have a separate case: breach of contract (of either national or EU provisions). This would lead to financial penalties and generally wake the institutions up.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/basic-princ...
For example, https://www.techdirt.com/2022/02/16/auguste-rodins-sculpture...
The steady state of this might be that most artifacts are at risk of being lost, certainly, but this particular combination of rules certainly makes it hard for a public museum to survive. Private collections face no such risk, of course.
And let's be real here; A ruling that a 3d scan of a piece of art is a "administrative document" would have been far weirder.
Completely an aside, but I find that a most unusual name for a Frenchman. AI informs me that Fitzjean is Norman and that last name is obviously Irish.
But, we are hearing from one side, one perspective. The museum has not had a fair expression of their side here.
Court proceedings can look unfairly bizarre when unfairly reported. I am not saying this report is definitely unfair, but it is impossible to tell
There's a saying "You can't beat city hall!" If you sue a public body then it'll be a public prosecutor defending the case. They probably eat lunch with another public employee every day: the judge on your case. Who are you, a dirty prole, to attack the government?
In your first line, in trial courts where you create your record, you face the simplest judges with the least legal knowledge and experience who will quickly dismiss your case on a whim.
Only at the appellate level do you stand any remote chance of turning things in your favor, and only then if your case is absolutely indisputable. Don't expect any of the courts to look logically or fairly at your evidence, or to accept your testimony over that of the government.
Just look at chaps[0] here who made an absolutely concrete case for the release of a database schema under FOIA, and was represented by the smartest and highest respected law firm in the state, and still got smashed.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chaps
[1] "Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas" https://mchap.io/
At least the metamath verifiers will not bend over backwards and come up with absurd inconsistent counterarguments.
It's the most humiliating thing for citizens when the legal cadre of a nation pretends in the national journal that everybody falls for its lies... openly mocking the concept of truth itself with absurdism.
I'm not sure what this sentence even means, of course the democracy should have define those.
its up to the electorate to democratically define what is a document, to define classifications of types of documents, and which ones are administrative.
> The judges main task is formalising reality and lawd, the rest of the inference is typically easy.
Except the judge is plainly ignoring valid derivations, and as a verifier making silly "proofs" up (civil law, not common law) in full-frontal-nudity on behalf of one party.
The problem is not the concept of law, nor the concept of democracy, nor the concept of formalization: the problem is how do we defend against and formalize a response to corrupt verifiers in the legal system?
Those who understand technology to verify arguments already exists can only come to the conclusion we'd be better of with formal verifiers in legal systems.
Those who understand law know that formal verifiers cannot replace a judge, because every facet of law (the writing of it, the interpretation of it, the application of it, and the enforcement of it) has to account for all the vagueries of human existence.
No formal verifier can account for definitions that need to expand as the scope of human endeavor expands. No formal verifier can determine mens rea. No formal verifier can determine if something is obscene. No formal verifier can determine someone's mental competence. No formal verifier can cover all mitigating factors. No formal verifier can apply mercy where mercy is needed.
No formulation of the law will solve this. The problem is clearly not that the law was unclear. Either the people with real power do what's right, or they don't.
It's a tall claim, given a proper formalization (say under democratic control), malicious counterparty just can't force the national formal verifier to pronounce this or that if it doesn't follow.
Imagine every autocrat or dictator and all agents of the state, having freedoms, would have to prove the law authorizes them to exercise this or that step, instead of dictating orders. Imagine everyone was raised to ignore authority figures and only execute commands that are provably in compliance with the law, raised to double check it by formal verification. It will point out any flaws on the path to the "desired conclusion". If properly grounded it would be hell for control freaks, they'd leave government positions at scale, the real problem solvers (some human, some machines if we cherish human rights etc more than vanity) would float up.
Does that sound it makes life easier or harder on your average boogeyman?
Ok I can at least see you've thought about this, but this part is not happening. Definitely not this century, probably not ever. Despite our best delusions, we're still just apes who follow other apes, mostly based on social relationships or the appearance of confidence. We can't even train our society to vote.
I wanted programmatic law in the past and then after thinking and talking a bit, concluded that self and cross consistency in the law is not considered necessary.
How do you know if you are breaking the law or not if it's inconsistent? And like the sibling points out, any inconsistency can be abused to declare you guilty or innocent on any behavior depending on the partisanship and interests of the judge.
If you want an entire legal system formally defined in logic, you're going to have to do a ton of novel work in expanding the understanding of and application of non-monotonic logic because there isn't much scholarship compared to monotonic logic systems.
That said, France is one of the only countries that has tried anything like this. Their tax system is required to be defined and expressed algorithmically, and they even built a programming language and compiler tool chain to do this. I think it uses monotonic logic, though, and I don't think anybody has seriously suggested the French tax code is something to be copied, neither as a tax code nor an approach to legal codification more generally.
That's a very interesting fact. Especially in the context of the recent news of the 50 billion euros deficit https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/france-budget-debt-deficit-g...
If their taxes are defined mathematically I would not expect constant mishaps with the budget.
I don’t get upset. I just don’t know what that means. What would that look like in practice?
Lets see some simple example. 18 U.S. Code § 912: “Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
How would you write that in mathematical formalization?
And then how would you make a metamath verifier judge if Robert J. Rippee committed it on January 1, 1991? I’m sure you can google the case(United States v. Rippee, 961 F.2d 677), but a short summary: “On January 1, 1991, officers from the National City, Illinois, Police Department stopped Rippee for making an illegal U-turn. The officers let Rippee go without a ticket, however, when he told them he was a United States Marshal on his way to break up a fight at Fannies' Night Club in Brooklyn, Illinois. […] Rippee stipulated that he was not and had never been a United States Marshal.“
How would something like that look like under your proposed system?
Consider a simple crime, murder. Let’s simplify it to “if you kill someone, that’s murder and you get life”
But then what if I’m being stabbed by the person I kill?
Okay so self defence.
But then what if I say it’s self defence but factually that’s incorrect, but I genuinely believed it was self defence?
What if I’m a soldier and I’m shooting an enemy?
What if I shoot them because they’re raping my child?
What if I’m shooting them because they raped my child ten years ago and I’ve been plotting my revenge ever since?
What if someone said they’ll shoot me if I didn’t shoot them?
What if I was in psychosis and thought they were going to kill me?
What if I thought they were a deer and shot them by mistake while hunting?
It turns out we have all these laws in this particular way because of thousands of years of work dealing with all of these issues.
And if you can’t sympathise with any of those cases, I hope you’re never called upon to decide anything involving other people.
Anyway it seems like much of this discussion presupposes the virtue of law and or has amnesia regarding its origins and its service to power. Sure there are exceptions, not every civilization has turned into a tinpot dictatorship because they adopted having a legal system. But without exception, it's those in power who make the rules. And quite often the powerful make rules that benefit them...often benefitting them exclusively.
I would rather live in a society with just laws than not, but again who settles what is just and what is not? Some people clearly have very different ideas. And yet geopolitics and world history aren't determined by the discourse.
And anyway, the law and justice are two different things. Many judges and attorneys will tell you so, I've known more than a few.