alt Hacker NewsTreachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict
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Perhaps look at the case from another perspective.
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.
There is certainly politics and posturing and power grabs behind the scenes, but besides that if we look at the economics it’s clearly worth revisiting.
I can understand a museum being worried about the long-term with the current structure:
- Operating a museum necessarily needs money. It’s not always a huge amount if they have the right relationships, but it’s never $0 and so money needs to come in
- Selling tickets relies on people seeing value in seeing the pieces in person
- Selling gift shop items also relies on people coming in as well as being the only source for good quality versions of those things
- Selling posters and other prints also relies on being the only source for good quality versions
What else brings in cash besides government funding (at risk over decades as politics shift) and maybe sales of some pieces (unsustainable of course since you need those to run a museum)?
I can understand the admin staff being terrified of letting the general public have access to files that have the potential to be turned in to perfect enough recreations, but I think everyone here knows that fear and litigation cannot solve their problems any more.
What is sustainable long-term? I suspect that an important piece is that on the whole, enough people want history to be preserved properly and they want some sort of institution to handle that preservation for the public good.
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?
Let us zoom out: The minister of culture, Rachida Dati, is under investigation for taking bribes. She came to power under Sarkozy, a president who was later convicted for taking donations from Gaddafi for his election.
Fascinating work and write-up. This is like a vignette of France: weaponized mauvaise-foi, sacred institutions and, more generally, some remnants of an aristocratic hierarchy, and also probably a lot of honest technical incompetence.
Oh boy.
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?
Very interesting discussion. Others here note a general question whether FOI laws are really intended to address such documents. But I have also another angle:
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...
Article is not useful because it does not bother to motivate why the scans were requested or why anyone other than a legalistic, formalistic person would consider them administrative documents. The author assumes all this is obvious and it isn't.
Surely the museum could have avoided a costly court case altogether by recording the point cloud on a urinal together with the signature "R. MUTT", thereby transforming it into a work of art and part of the patrimony of the French nation rather than a public document.
A very good warning to most museums that rely on reproductions and so on to not make high-quality scans of their artifacts. Once you do so, you lose a revenue stream in reproductions because anyone then will have high-quality data to produce reconstructions. If anyone has already done this, they are probably best served to immediately destroy those on some kind of archival cost pretext, retaining only the original artifacts.
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.
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.
https://www.lincoln3dscans.co.uk/ Oliver Laric, an artist worked with the museum to scan and make available their collection.
I guess I never want to do business in France. What an abominable court system.
Forgive me for my ignorance: Why should the Rodin Museum be obligated to provide 3D scans of Rodin’s sculptures? OP jumps into legal arguments about FOI without connecting the dots from the law to the point clouds.
Steal, lie, cheat, do what you want as long as you do not take from other _people_. A government is not a person, a business is not a person, a museum is not a person. They should not have the power to deprive you from accessing any media which they "own" but did not create.
Do they actually have any sculptures that don't already have copies spread around the world in other museums? They are fighting a losing battle here.
> Alexis Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh
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.
It’s 2026. Take your phone and make your own point cloud in under 5 minutes.
I did it with some statues in Italy. 3D prints were at my door before I stepped off the plane.
I'll fucking scan them then. Are they just out on the floor? They can't stop me.
That is problem I have personally experienced in France that the administrative justice is bat shit and often being biased and not respecting citizen laws.
I had cases where the official body lied, and the lies where exposed but still it is like they didn't care. Real example:
- opposite side: the memorandum of the accusation was complete enough as you can see they have 90 pages.
- me: what, no, lies, my memorandum is 15 pages as you can obviously see counting the pages.
- decision: rules against me because my 90 pages memorandum shows that the analysis was complete enough.
Another case:
- me: election should be cancelled because not respecting the at least 30% parity law
- opposing party: argument without ground because 1 woman over 6 mans, 1/5 = 40% so please reject the request.
- me: but no, 1/5 = 20% not 40%.
- decision: rejected because more than 30% proved by opposition.
And the worse of all in some decisions "ok, they didn't respect the law, didn't respect the due process, but if they did would have it changed that much the result? Not sure so let's reject the request as without ground..."
But if you over speed the limit, then you will get a ticket in all cases. So it is like not the same justice for everyone.
And something that can explain a little bit why administrative justice is so aweful in France is that judges in this instances are not professional judges but former gouvernement workers that are assigned there. So in the end it is like asking gouv workers to rule against other gouv workers decisions. Totally biased.
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“Our point clouds are so technologically mysterious we can’t even visualize them” is the tell. That isn’t expert judgment, it’s a claim about a file format, and it’s falsifiable in an afternoon: a plaintext point cloud opens in any free viewer (CloudCompare, MeshLab) and you can read the point count straight off the file. The article already demonstrates it with third-party visualizations. The “funding applications don’t exist” line fell the same way, to a second FOI request to the ministry. The unsettling part isn’t the lying. It’s that the falsification was handed to the court and changed nothing about the museum’s credibility on the remaining issues.
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On the face of it this is establishment forces looking after each other to hold back data they fear could have value when it should be in the (French) public domain
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
In case anyone wanted further evidence that legal systems everywhere are not for the people...
People always get upset when I propose mathematical formalization of law and using e.g. metamath verifier as a judge.
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.
The Rodin Museum's bronzes are not even "the originals", which makes this whole thing amusing.
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...