I really want to understand the perspective of the other side of this case. Why did this museum care so much about this issue? They appear to have put an enormous legal effort into preventing the release of these point cloud scans. Why?
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.
It would be a warehouse without public access.
The museum literally exists because they’re expected to display some things.
The preservationists who fight against showing anything wish the museum part didn’t exist. They want it all to be a big warehouse where nobody can see anything.
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.
"The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."
"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."
Moreover, the Ministry of Culture's call for projects expressly emphasized that one of the main objectives of this program was to promote "free and open consultation of digital cultural resources for all Internet users"
(These statements are from the museum's applications and the Ministry's call for digitization projects, which are linked in the body of my story.)
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.
I mean, the museum setting is an arbitrary middle ground between the initial intended presentation (a 19th century salon or 20th century gallery showing, in specific physical spaces, likely to be attended by specific people) and wherever and at whatever fidelity that initial presentation is reproduced. What's impure enough to be verboten? No thumbnails in museum brochures or online? Do we restrict entrance to the demographic that was initially present? Are we allowed to light them with modern fixtures? Must the air in the gallery be a reproduction of Paris or New York's historical smog?
An artist's intent should be respected, sure, but I do wonder how much of it is that, and how much of it is a sort of elitism and gatekeeping from people who are not the artist.
The rest of what you wrote is unnecessarily pedantic.
I'm not aware that Lynch has actively taken any measures to prevent people from viewing his movies on a phone. Giving recommendations is very different from enforcing your views on others. The guy also made a TV series to criticize television btw - I could see him doing the same with phones if he was still around instead of trying to prevent people from viewing his art on their phones.
> 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.)
Oh please, minimalist art is not just being criticized because people view it on screens but because simply not everyone views it as all that impressive. A giant turd is still a turd after all.
It doesn't seem outrageous to me though that there exists a category of documents more detailed and sensitive than "administrative" documents.
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...
If that's how France feels, we can give them 3D point cloud files.
Of course it doesn't make any sense. We're engineering for (particularly inane) legal requirements, not information theoretic ones.
However, if The Rules are somehow that industry standard point cloud files are un-FOI-able, then any file can be made un-FOI-able, because any file can be translated to/from a standard point cloud file.
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".
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...
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
I doubt it. How much merchandise relies on high quality 3D scans?
I think the real reason is that a lot of people are naturally paranoid control freaks. Their instinct is that these scans should be secret and they never really think beyond that.
Weird that anyone would care, since most of those works are presumably public domain. Is it not the legal right, in most of the Western world, of the public to reproduce such works, let alone to use them as elements in their own work?
I don’t think every work done by a state controlled entity is automatically public domain, right?
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/arts/design/museums-mull-...
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....
Somehow he thinks that the sculpture is his own as he is the custodian, and so that he has all rights. And pictures or 3d scans in the end belongs to him also, like if the virtual thing was a physical item locked in the museum.
If he is forced to release publicly the 3d scan, especially against his goodwill, it is like being striped of his power and authority so he couldn't allow that. It becomes a personal matter.
The only thing that could have worked is to befriend him or create a cultural organisation and have lobbied to him in the first place that he would learned a lot of reputation/marketing points by releasing it. Imagine a dedicated website and grand champagne event with the incompetent minister of culture where they push the button...
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.
"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."
“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'm not saying you're wrong, but saying "FOI is not meant for that" is the type of answer that requires some solid evidence that the other comment didn't provide.
Re: a hypothetical LLM: French FOI law covers all document formats. The CADA and courts have routinely recognized that documents produced by the government in formats such as audio recordings, x-rays, photographs (of submerged shipwrecks, no less), application source code, and computer algorithms may be considered administrative documents, communicable to the public.
So, if the French government produced an LLM and front end then, yes, that LLM model and its front end would be an administrative document, in principle communicable to the public. To me that does not seem improper or difficult or strange to imagine.
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.
Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…