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- Hacker News
- 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...
by goobatrooba - 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.by contubernio
- 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.
by joshspankit - 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?
by pj_mukh - 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.by MITSardine
- 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?by simonw
- 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.
- 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...
by Animats