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...
> What scares the Rodin Museum is that they are still selling reproductions.
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.
What's the issue with 3D printing?? The open-source community reproduction of Roden's The Thinker is at least as hi-rez as the professional scans.
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?
I have a friend in museum management and I socialize with their museum friends.
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 theyâre forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who donât 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 Iâve 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 professions seem especially prone to this priesthood mindset. Inward-looking, amplified self-regard, and dedicated to a mission that nobody asked them to take on, because the new mission is more gratifying and ego-boosting.
Some software engineers do this â 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.
This is not even rare or just in niche professions - this is everywhere, and perhaps even the default if not actively fought. I always found it dishonourable myopic.
Nietzsche said that the priests are the enemies, and I'm starting to think he was on to something.
Itâs not a totally crazy idea to insist that certain artworks should only be viewed in certain ways. Iâm reminded of David Lynch saying something similar about watching movies on your phone:
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 donât work if you arenât 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.
It is a crazy idea when theyâre not your work in the first place. David Lynch made his movies. The museum didnât make the sculptures.
Then why scan them in the first place?
I suppose I donât think a lot on museums and their operation.
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 doesnât 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 ârarityâ 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 âBuild you a house.â
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.
The museum's purpose is to preserve the artwork and scanning it furthers that purpose.
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.
Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.
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.
It states in the article *[our lawyer] advised us that [...] the judges would be extremely deferential to the Rodin Museum and would grant it the benefit of any doubts* but doesn't dare to say why they would be deferential.... It's probably because these high level cultural institutions basically get to do whatever they want... France definitely loves their institutions.
>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...
Is the museum supposed to have such a monopoly? Because then the ruling would be disappointing but ultimately not incoherent.
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?
TFA discusses this in depthâand that the end ruling (according to the article) was haphazard, inconsistent, and indefensible.
> Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.
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 foundationâknown in German as the Stiftung PreuĂischer Kulturbesitz (SPK)âis 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-... )
I ask myself that with every FOIA request. If I had a dollar for every internal email I obtained saying that the public body intended to ignore the FOIA and make me sue for access, I would certainly be able to buy a sandwich.
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.
My guess is that citizen's freedom (of information) places a compulsion (of fulfillment) on the body being summoned, and our natural inclination has always been to resist being compelled.
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 often have the experience of going to a museum, seeing a painting I like, and then not being able to find any image of it online - let alone a highres scan. In my casual searches I've found museums generally don't share high resolution scans of their collections. Try to find high resolution images of famous, but not super famous paintings. It's often virtually impossible.
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
Oh boy.
I donât 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 Iâm 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?
This case was about trying to obtain the museumâs own scans under FOI, itâs nothing to do with releasing your own scans.
Iâm open to ideas but I donât see how they could screw you if theyâre your own scans. They canât copyright stolen artifacts from other countries, so they canât get you on copyright. Itâs not their files, so they canât get you on piracy.
Do it.
What is a spatial index
By the time you get C&Dâd it would be far too late.
Iâd spend a while thinking about it but I know what my immediate impulse would be.
I guess I never want to do business in France. What an abominable court system.
Freedom of information law's in almost all countries are about being able to access administrative documents so there can be accountability and transparency. The court ruled that a 3D scan is in this case not an administrative document.
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.
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.
Even without the original high quality scans, surely some talented artists could make a passable facsimile which is suitable to sell in a knick-knack gift shop.
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.
will this be appealed at the EU level?
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.
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