> The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position
It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.)
I was initially sympathetic to the museum, as it's common for public funding to be tight, and revenue from the gift shop or commercial licencing of their objects can fill the gap. I don't know about France, but I expect the ministry has been heavily pushing public museums to increase their income in this way.
However, that doesn't justify the deception described by the article.
This same person fought for years to get the Berlin Egyptian museum to release 3D scans of the famous Nefertiti bust. The museum also claimed it would undermine its revenue streams through the gift shop, but as the case progressed, that turned out to be very misleading - the museum had made less than 5000 EUR over ten years from 3D scans.
What's to stop a replica maker from scanning a replica bought from the gift shop? I am very skeptical that a trinket purchaser will care about or be able to identify any scanning errors introduced.
You should look at what the guy behind this company actually sells - they are very upscale replicas going in famous American homes, my guess is the standards are quite high
I have no clue if museums are in that space at all though
Why would they lie about it then? These museums are subsidized by tax payers, not only just local money but often with additional EU funding as well. The scans were paid for by the public. This seems comically evil for no apparent reason.
Bureaucracies always argue for the continuation of the bureaucracy and its funding, no matter how insane or small. It's what they naturally do and you have to explicitly fight against it.
First we pay for the scans then we also get to pay for the legal fight trying to not share it with us???
Then the fight should continue until it can dispose of dysfunctional beurocrats? Set an example? It seems normal to fire people who dont understand their work.
In germany, there is a current case going on where one ministry sues another, both with taxpayer money, obviously. Has led to to funny media reportings.
Because among copyright/IP maximalists, the whole point is that they own an idea or a picture or a look or a fashion and deserve to keep it to themselves forever. It's not a rational attitude, but it's a real one and unfortunately rather common.
Flip the script and make everything public unless it has a sort-of "license" which explicitly restricts access. People can proactively restrict access to their work, which would allow for lawsuits, and others can see the potentially very restrictive licenses which some will put on their stuff and possibly learn to avoid such licenses.
Hard to say how that would look or happen in practice but it's interesting to think about.
>Hard to say how that would look or happen in practice
It's essentially how art worked up until last couple of hundred years, it worked just fine. During most of the most important periods of art history, copyright wasn't a thing.
This suggestion reminded me of the ad-hoc open access decrees (aka "letters patent" (aka H-1B visas)) that might have supercharged modern Venice : whether for inventions of glassmaking, inventions of new books, or inventions of the Americas :
This involved lobbying the local rulers though... so was restricted to few chosen, and I am not certain that the situation would be much different today, because it's hard to imagine enforcement working for widespread ad-hoc licenses ?
And the meta-question of "why did the museum choose to waste money on lawyers that way" is "bureaucrat X decided that the scans belong to the museum, so no further logic or rational thinking will be applied unless absolutely forced to".
That's a common property of all large institutions: the reasons why a decision is made may as well be arbitrary, but by golly will they stick to it and die on the hill, if they can.
Maintaining the status quo is almost always the path of least resistance for organizations like this. Saying no to something new is easy, to say yes puts you out on a limb with uncertain strength.
Although I agree(stuff bought with tax money should go to tax payers), you do realize that many people don't see it that way. Especially when their career rely on withholding the stuff in question.
Another example: if people have access to 3D scans, then they might come to the museum anymore because they can make a virtual tour... (I doubt of that, but well, it's an example)
But, of course, as a tax payer, I wanted these 3D scans (somebody voted for that at some point). So now the pandora's box is open.
The problem, I guess, is that a museum is not there to be profitable. Unfortunately, "modern management" crept in there and now they have to be somehow profitable or at least make an effort to be so. And so, information withholding is a way to achieve that goal.
As a society we have to choose: we keep museums so that everyone can enjoy art, or we think they have to be profitable first...
This is so important. Museums (should) exist because the artifacts are rare and must necessarily be protected and confined. They should be overjoyed that scans allow everyone to enjoy these artifacts, even without visiting a museum.
The problem is that every institution has been corrupted by the capitalistic viewpoint that everything needs to be profitable to work. Everyone believes that and lives there live around those principals there is not much room for a common domain any more.
> The problem, I guess, is that a museum is not there to be profitable
Well, the most democratic way we have found in the West to understand if a product or an initiative is relevant for the population is to see if it’s profitable (via sales or donations), or in other words, via the free market.
Otherwise you are imposing on the citizens the maintenance of an organization based on the criteria from either the political party in power or some bureaucrats. And we all know that their incentives are usually not aligned with their citizens, but mostly to perpetuate their position of power.
I personally also believe Museums are important to preserve our history and facilitate research, but not all types and not at all costs. And specially they should not be a nest of corruption as I have observed. So I’m most inclined to let the free market decide, which includes private foundations or wealthy individuals owning museums (e.g. Getty Center in LA).
> Well, the most democratic way we have found in the West to understand if a product or an initiative is relevant for the population is to see if it’s profitable (via sales or donations), or in other words, via the free market.
I would say the most democratic way we have found is voting. The free market is efficient, but not concerned with democracy.
They’re afraid of losing out on the revenue from selling replicas, etc. which is probably a very reasonable fear given that the guy filing suit and writing this blog post runs a company that creates replica artwork?
>They’re afraid of losing out on the revenue from selling replicas
You're aware that you don't need a 3D scanner (much less a 3D scan) to produce a replica of a sculpture (..or a replica of a replica), right?
There's this ancient technique, known as casting, still in use today - which was used to produce some of the very sculptures being scanned in the first place!
Well, apparently the museum really wants to make sure they have a monopoly on the files, to be able to sell the official copies in their gift shop. No doubt these are of high enough quality that those could be the base of a mould?
Scans of paintings are usually considered public domain, why wouldn’t 3D scans of sculptures be different?
> 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. In the nearly 10 years since it had created the Nefertiti scan, SPK had completely failed to commercially exploit the valuable data idling on its hard drives.
Right, no one is buying the digital scans. But tons of people buy physical replicas- I have been a volunteer at a different museum and our physical models of our most famous artifacts were very nice money makers for us, so I presume they would be for them as well. And using that digital scan you can make your own competing physical replica. Which is why the museum doesn't really want to make it easy for any 3D printer to compete with them.
Revenue from “marketing the 3d scans” is not the same as “revenue from selling replicas” and it is the latter that they are trying to protect, not the sale of the scans directly
As illustrated in a number of cases mentioned throughout this thread, this revenue is minimal.
It is simply easier to say "no" instead of going out on a limb and saying yes and then your bosses coming at you for doing what you shouldn't have done.
Nobody will be reprimanded for saying "no", but somebody might for just granting access to these 3d scans.
Maybe they were worried about sales of photos of the bust, and other products of the bust but not created using the scans? Could one take all the scans and produce a coffee table book of photos similar to what the gift shops often sell?
Honestly the whole gift shop argument is weird. I have no sympathy for them. You can get plenty of knockoffs now if you wanted: the world is full of Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, Eiffel Tower, etc keychains and trinkets even without scans. Gift shops already have to compete with those.
Moreover, these museums get public funding for their operation AND the 3D scanning initiatives. It's not like the gift shop is the defining feature here.
Exactly! The amount of worry they have is stupid and nonsensical and ultimately used to disguise their real reasons of just not wanting to share anything.
It seems that with the advent/improvements in AR/VR that measuring the direct sales of scan data is the wrong way to look at the losses.
If many people can experience a 75% compelling viewing of the bust (or the pyramids, Galapagos, Chichen Itza, etc.), the losses in tourism to those sites is far more than the lost sales of scan data.
I doubt it. People go to see the original Mona Lisa when they can own a reproduction for less than the cost of the flight. I don't see why those who would have gone to see it would suddenly accept a reproduction just because it's AR/VR.
There are hundreds of places I’d like to experience in my lifetime. I probably have the time left to go to perhaps 50 of them (max). Surely being able to experience some of those 300 in VR will affect my lifetime travel plans and I highly doubt that I’m alone.
That's my point. Your top 50 are going to stay your top 50. If you've always wanted to see the Mona Lisa in person you're not going to change your plan because you saw an image of it.
My top 50 to see in person would definitely change if 25 of them can be experienced in VR. (I might still go in person to my top 3, but there's a lot of nearly even exchange among spots 4-100.)
VR isn't that amazing yet, you may as well just sit close to a big screen curved TV with earphones if going in person isn't ultimately that important.
If the smells, sights, people you meet, experience including entering the country and flying, food, traffic, general cultural things etc are not important, why even have it on your list?
Travel should be about the journey as much as the destination, when possible.
This doesn’t seem likely, the major tourist destinations during the busy season are so crowded, or slot limited, that it’s a pretty unpleasant experience.
Not really. Their goal shouldn't be to maximize profit and they should take care not to price people out from access to cultural artifacts. If the goal is just to reduce the number of visitors then a lottery system or limitations on ticket sales issued on a first come first served basis is far more fair.
Lottery system could plausibly result in resale of tickets and thus reduce to pricing people out.
The problem with cases like Mona Lisa is that Louvre never really is that overcrowded, but Mona Lisa attracts a crowd at all times (even if it's less than 1% of all visitors on the grounds of Louvre, that's still a lot).
> How is pricing by available time to wait any more fair than pricing by available money to spend?
Because its a lot easier to get someplace early on your day off than it is to suddenly get into another tax bracket. Even poor people usually get at least one day off every single week.
Restricting access by income level is going to leave most people who don't earn enough locked out for their entire lives because upward economic mobility is declining in the EU and a total joke in the US.
Certainly when it comes to travel there's already a high barrier and limitations on opportunity so a lottery might be better than only knowing if you'll get in on the day.
No? Those who earn less can save up money, it’s not like it will cost millions of dollars either.
And money is a lot more fungible than time, so in literally the dictionary sense, it is just as fair or even better (assuming the pricing stays below say a monthly salary).
If that is your opinion then clearly the user could have responded to the actual parent comment that they believe contained such, higher up in the comment chain.
I'm sorry, are you having a hard time understanding how online conversations work? I wasn't involved in any of the above comments. I know from this interaction to never interact with you again if I can help it though.
I can’t make heads or tails out of this logic so I’ll just say it frankly:
I didn’t choose to reach out and engage with you, ‘Tostino’, or ‘thfuran’, nor do I care about who ‘Tostino’ wants to interact with, relative ‘arguments’, etc…, because this user didn’t exist for me until 3 comments ago!
There literally wasn’t enough time to care about this nonsense. So take it and leave already instead of doubling down.
I'm just going to keep replying until you stop. It's amusing at this point.
Edit: It's funny seeing the extra comments you then deleted or edited come through in my email.
My guy, you couldn't understand that when I said "I wasn't involved in any of the above comments." I was talking about your original interaction (with someone else) where you went off the rails, not after I started talking to you in the comment chain.
There are already compelling POV videos, drone footage, and photos from wonderful angles in brilliant conditions (sunsets, no other tourists...), yet people still go and visit wven if they don't get any of the perfection that may have been captured with these art forms.
Simply, the emotions caused and felt when you experience art live, things that run through your mind and how and who with you live it, are not matched by any of the depictions you can get. Even primal senses like feeling the wind, torching sun and smell of your sweat and sand in the desert as you glance at the pyramids are far more immersive than VR will become for another couple of decades at least.
That is 500€ a year they could spend on random crap. From my limited experience with the German government any actually viable income stream would immediately result in politicians cutting public funding and overcompensate significantly.
I very quickly had no sympathy at all with the museum. It obtained funding to do the scans with the express purpose of providing to the public, and then decided not to.
> In an ironic development, the judges specifically reasoned against musée Rodin’s trade secrecy claim by citing its 3D digitization funding applications to the Ministry of Culture, in which the museum stipulated its commitment to publishing its scans. The museum had attempted to hide these funding applications from us and the court, telling the court they did not exist.
The Rodin museum is my favorite. They sell a very limited selection of his sculptures at the gift shop and some of the sculptures. You literally just can’t get near them. They’re in the middle of a fountain. I would certainly 3-D print the scans and have them at my house. I don’t know how that would take any income away from the museum.
I've not been to the Rodin museum, but this summer I visited the Hirshhorn sculpture garden in DC. One of their exhibits is one of the 12 original casts of Rodin's "burghers of Calais".
Except this summer they were doing some maintenance work, so this wonderful huge bronze sculpture was moved off to a corner, fenced off and surrounded by picnic tables where people sat to eat ice cream. The contrasting juxtaposition was just incredible to observe.
This the law of unintended consequences in action. I suspect that neither the government nor museums thought there was any legal obligations to make 3D scans public and I'd wager that the legislator did not have that in mind when they drafted the freedom of information laws.
But then, suddenly (as per linked article):
"The Commission on Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) ... had never before considered any dispute about 3D scans. It affirmed my request that musée Rodin communicate copies of its scans to me, determining for the first time that public agencies’ 3D scans are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public."
A decision which has been going up the chain of courts since and is apparently close to the possibly dramatic climax.
Indeed, the commercial argument is therefore irrelevant to this and the museum was clutching at straws there, really...
How is the publication of the scans an unintended consequence, if it was stated as intention in the grant application?!
I also dont see at all how this is even a problem for the museum: Their gift shop is basically a rounding error in their revenue stream in the first place, availability of cheap replicas online would only marginally affect gift shop sales anyway, and what person would ever go like "oh no lets cancel the trip to the museum because there is a good 3d model of their main exhibit on thingiverse"?!
>How is the publication of the scans an unintended consequence, if it was stated as intention in the grant application?!
Perhaps it's unintended in that they never thought they'd be called on it. Requests for public funding almost always claim it's for the betterment of the public despite almost never being so and no one ever gets called out on it.
> Requests for public funding almost always claim it's for the betterment of the public despite almost never being so and no one ever gets called out on it.
That's just corruption and we should absolutely be calling out every instance of it. If that's not the exception right now, I hope that changes in the near future.
As per quote in my previous comment the crux of the matter is that 3D scans were deemed "administrative documents" in the sense of the freedom of information laws. This might be why they are fighting tooth and nail because if that is ultimately upheld this will apply to all scans in all public institutions, which all become accessible.
>This might be why they are fighting tooth and nail because if that is ultimately upheld this will apply to all scans in all public institutions, which all become accessible.
Which is a pretty sweet comeuppance for not handing over these specific scans when asked.
Good laws try to be future-proof. Transparency of government is a big deal in liberal democracies.
It's incongruous for a museum to resist something like this, when exhibiting artifacts to the public is one of the main reasons for their very existence.
Legislators are human beings. "Future-proof" is one thing, guessing all possible cases is quite another and perhaps their aim simply wasn't things like 3D scans at all, as mentioned, because freedom of information laws came about to tackle a completely different issue (which was indeed transparency, not scans of sculptures...)
That's how it is and key to this case, and not really discussed in any comments. I am not commenting on the museum's actions to defend against this, which they must think is in their interest. So I don't understand the hate... it's getting difficult to discuss on more and more topics.
Ok, I guess "transparency" doesn't begin to cover all potential cases, CADA's role is to ensure the freedom of access to administrative documents, but also to public archives and to the re-use of public information.
And any document created during a public service mission is concerned, regardless of whether it's in a text, visual, audio, etc. format, the law specifically abstaining from giving an exhaustive list or even type of documents, considering their variety.
And why would point clouds of statues be exempt when point clouds of buildings or landscapes are not ?
Legislators are human beings indeed, not computers, they are able to try to convey "the spirit of the law", and hope that their successors will be able to understand them.
The "hate" is from, yet again, taking taxpayer money, while basically doing the opposite of their job.
The fact that this was the first time release of 3D scans was being requested does not imply those were not intended consequences: for any type of document, there has been a first.
> It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.)
Public access appears to have been an explicit condition of the government grant they applied to for the money to make the scans.
In the previous story over the Nefertiti bust, the German museum tried to use this gift shop defense, but then when pressed, you could see that they made almost no money from it.
Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. The public can freely access hundreds of scans of classical sculpture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and visitors to the Smithsonian’s website can view, navigate, and freely download thousands of high-quality scans of artifacts ranging from dinosaur fossils to the Apollo 11 space capsule.
Has anyone used these in games? They would be great easter eggs and they have artistry and design that is far beyond almost anything DIY.
No doubt someone has put some of them into games. However, most likely not in it's original shape/form, as the scans usually produce highly inefficiently (but high resolution, great for renders) meshes. The meshes from scans tend to be a mess, and when inserting a 3D model for games, you care a lot about how optimized the meshes are, and that the mesh has a low polygon count as otherwise you'll tank the performance quickly.
So since a developer couldn't just copy-paste the model into the game (requires a prepass to fix issues/optimize before import), it'll take valuable time from other things for just this easter egg. Again, no doubt someone has done this at one point or another, but that's probably why it isn't as common as someone could think.
Sadly, it's simply too much detail to be able to import straight up. Luckily, Nanite ("Virtualized Geometry") and similar implementations starts to give us tools so we can stop caring about things like this and let the game engine optimize stuff on the fly.
3d scanning is a pretty common technique to get some example geometry for stuff in games. It's not difficult to retopologize the scans to work better in a game engine. I don't know much about those pipelines though, but either way 3d scanning is super popular in the industry. Check this for example https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/retopologise-3d-scans-...
I sincerely hope more games allow virtual interactions with culturally significant art. Hell, I'd love a virtual tour of major art institutions!
It's not Rodin, but the game Horizon: Forbidden West has a segment where you get to view + interact with renderings of some paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt. I've seen some of these in person at a museum in San Francisco, but somehow the experience was more meaningful in the game, despite having comparative potato quality compared to real life. I think what made the difference was that in the game, each painting had several lines of dialogue about what the painting represented, or elements thereof represented, about what was going on when the artist created it, etc, and the dialogue choices included questions I would never have thought to ask about in person.
I know that museums have virtual tours that have ausio descriptions like that about the art pieces, but I've never managed to take advantage of them. Can you imagine being able to take a high-detail virtual tour (even if not in VR) of a museum like the one in the article, or the Louvre, where you could spend as long as you want looking at every painting, zoom in at details like brushwork or how the light hits it, and have an expanding set of accessible narration (or readable text) about each item?
> I sincerely hope more games allow virtual interactions with culturally significant art. Hell, I'd love a virtual tour of major art institutions!
Outside of virtual tours, death match in a museum would be fun too. It might be cool to see where popular works of art end up in post-apocalyptic/future settings too.
Even less popular artworks could help add to the art that appears in video games. It can help cut down on the costs of using stock images or creating "generic" art in-house and hopefully create more impressive and immersive environments.
Still, let's not forget that the detail, the last nuances, is what makes great art so powerful. Lots of people can paint sunflowers or a cathedral (or make a typical computer game).
Working that into a computer game is of course a big practical issue, as you say; also, unless the players will zoom way in for some reason, possibly the maximum effect is a resolution that's still less than what the museums provide. But maybe for the ultimate prize at the end, a close look in the treasure chest, when all the other on-screen action is done? It's hard to provide a visual reward that lives up to the moment, or exceeds it, after 100 hours of play.
The published British Museum Rosetta stone is not even what I would consider a high quality scan today. In a proper scan you would be able to easily discern the carved writing just from the geometry. At 1mm faces, it's actually a pretty good candidate to dump straight into UE5 nanite so I disagree fundamentally that it is not able to be used in games. The only real question for the modern developer is whether it makes sense to spend ~50MB budget to put the thing in.
> it's actually a pretty good candidate to dump straight into UE5 nanite so I disagree fundamentally that it is not able to be used in games.
Yeah, obviously the new virtualized geometry approach modern engines are taking kind of make that argument less valid. I thought I was doing a good job ending my comment with mentioning this recent change, but maybe I didn't make it clear enough :)
Even modern high end graphics cards use abstractions of the base data to create vast amounts of the final output's fine detail. For example tessellation and other techniques used for complex geometry like compound curves, which allow millions or billions of polygons can be visually simulated without needing to be present as polygon data, increasing opportunity for processing parallelization, while reducing load on communication busses and VRAM.
As an example, you could probably represent something like the grip of this FLIR camera in a couple hundred polygons and surface/curve definitions to help the rendering engine tesselate correctly. On the other hand, this overall scan is 357000 vertexes. Sure you can simplify it and bake a bunch of the texture into a normal map, but that then requires manually reworking the texture map and various other postprocessing steps to avoid creating a glitchy mess.
> it wouldn't be easy because these scans are highly detailed and so would require too many polygons to be loaded at once
In practice a a 3d artist could very easily create low poly models for these objects. For that low poly replica the high poly model can serve as a useful reference. (But to be honest many artist can just look at images of the object and do the same.)
This is not even hard, on the order of minutes (for something like the Rosetta Stone) or days (for something seriously detailed).
In this case where there is a will, there is a way. In fact this "reduction" step very often part of the game creation pipeline already. Monsters/characters/objects very often get sculpted at a higher resolution and then those high resolution meshes are reduced down to something more manageable (while they bake the details into a bump map texture, or similar).
Not too much, it does actually work :) The concept is generally called "virtualized geometry" and Unreal's implementation is called "Nanite" but others are starting to pop up too, like the virtualized geometry implementation in Bevy.
A bit simplified but yeah. In the industry I think it's commonly referred to as "cleaning up the topology" or "simplifying the topology" where "topology" is the structure of the mesh essentially. You'd put the scan/model through something like this: https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/retopologise-3d-scans-...
> is this true with top spec machines too?
Games frequently feature 100s (sometimes 1000s) of models at the same time, so the optimization of each model is important. Take a look at the launch of Cities Skylines 2 for an example of a game that launched without properly optimized 3D models, the performance was absolutely abysmal because the human/resident models were way more detailed than justified for a city simulation game.
For rendering an individual piece, maybe not; but as part of much larger scene with many objects, animation, and rendering effects, it would place an unnecessary burden on the GPU.
It would be much easier to simply have a 3D artist create the object anew from scratch, in a format and resolution that best fits the game.
This makes me think about old racing games. (Maybe it was Gran Turismo?)
I remember the racing games had likenesses of some major manufacturer cars, but I believe the license terms said that the cars could not look bad. So not show crash damage, modification, etc..
Basically, the license terms protected the brand.
Now what if you put some country's national/cultural artifacts in a game... then let them get weapon or explosive damage?
The kind of person who’s good at making games and is excited about ancient artifacts makes their own 3D assets that make the most sense for their game.
It depends what you mean: If you mean, they like the idea of 'ancient' and 'artifacts', they may make up their own. If they like the actual history, then the whole point of the ancient artificats in the museums is that they are actual things from actual ancient civilizations - making something up would defeat the purpose.
Also, as I said, almost certainly they lack the artistry to match what's in the museum, simply because what's in the museum is often the pinnacle of human creativity over millenia.
The British museums license at least is creative commons non-commercial which would likely prevent them being used as something insignificant like easter egg as a license would need to be acquired.
This is kinda amazing that one has fight for it. I would like to think any museum should be immensely grateful to anyone willing to put in his time to either do the scanning himself or at least to provide an open platform to distribute the scans.
Honestly, I am less sympathetic about this particular case (I mean, who cares about accurate representations of Rodin's sculptures anyway?), but making an open catalog of all digital copies of all ancient stuff found this far really should be #1 priority for history as a research discipline at this point, IMO. It is absurd that anyone would actively prevent that. Yet, at some sites you aren't even allowed to take a photo (yes, w/o a flash), even if it is accessible. Most important sites and archives, obviously, aren't accessible to normal people at all.
I just don't understand how you sit on the museums side of the trial on this, without seriously questioning your own position and conceding immediately.
They were basically arguing that they are entitled to hide those scan artifacts to better protect their gift shop?! How can they even reconcile those arguments with preserving the artists legacy/serving the common good?
I'm also surprised at how nonchalantly the french supreme (!!) court seems to cope with the museum just ignoring their two month deadline for three months in the new trial... Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
My conclusion is that there is either pure stubbornness or some weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side, because I have no other explanation why they would fight so hard for their position seemingly against all reason.
> weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side
That's exactly it. I work on a website that makes ancient artefacts accessible. A lot of them are in museums. You wouldn't believe how many museums:
- don't want to show you their archive
- don't want to let you take pictures
- want you to share only low res pictures
- want you to get permission before you can "publish" their artefacts, etc.
It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them.
It's ridiculous. Fortunately, the people working on the website are relentless, and manage to eventually get collection after collection photographed and added mostly by being patient. For some collections it took 20 years before they got access -- but since everyone uses their website, and everyone apart from the local museum director wants the stuff to be in there, eventually they get access to most things.
(Museums in Italy are the worst, allegedly. They really think they own antiquity.)
That is because the stated goal of "preservation" isn't really their goal. Thats only lip-service.
Their actual goal is getting visitors, and any kind of usable information in the form of photos, videos, 3d-scans, transcriptions or whatever leaving their premises is a problem. Add to that the associated huge business of tourism and you have the explanation why the state and the courts (who are usually good buddies with the state and the upper class, including the cultural elite) also don't want to change that status quo.
Ah, the standard Music Industry response to Napster, alive and well decades later.
"Make the information hard to get! We own it!"
Never realizing that sampling of the information makes it just that much more prestigious and desirable to us, the unwashed masses, willing to pay to visit a museum that has AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS.
If you start with the assumption that every view is a lost sale, you're going to have a really bad time.
Outside of the Louvre and maybe the Smithsonian, there are no current world-famous museums, simply regionally or subculture-appreciated museums, some with bygone fame that a small portion of the older population would recognize. The Rodin Museum may be popular among a tiny niche slice of people, but if they were to make an internally consistent strategy that they want growth then they'd release more information.
Actually, imho, the AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS are actually useless. You can not touch them, get close, rotate them, look at them properly, take your time. You are just number 29387 that day visiting the Mona Lisa, you get 5s to view it, then the line moves on.
A high-res photo or 3d-scan allows you to do all those things (maybe except really touching them).
So aside from the emotional benefit of having been near the real original piece for a few seconds, all digital derivatives are logically far better.
When we were there, I took a picture of the Mona Lisa strictly for the crowd in the foreground. To capture the memory of the stupid number of people who seemingly only come to the museum to see that one piece of art.
Then we went and spent a few hours enjoying the rest of the museum, where there is plenty of art I appreciated more.
I’ve been told that digital (and analogue) photography still cannot reproduce all the colors in good enough detail, and the screens are still not good enough to reproduce the details that can be seen in person.
"largest area" immediately brought "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" to mind - not for actual impact, just because the physical painting is nearly 10 feet across, which noone seems to expect. Also it's on one wall of an enormous room with plenty of room for people to circulate, in a gallery that has various options for free access (mostly aimed at locals and students, but the art institute doesn't seem too picky about it.)
The Scream by Munch can be viewed for several hours at a time. It's actually limited by efforts to conserve the painting, so the museum only expose it to light for a few hours per day.
If you time your visit to avoid the tourist season in den Haag, I think you can also view Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring for essentially as long as you like.
To put a darker spin on this, a not-insignificant amount of most museum collections are stolen property. Either stolen from other European countries, stolen from countries the museum's country colonized, or stolen from another European country who stole it from a country they colonized.
And to make things even weirder, China has gone on a little-noticed crusade to steal back artifacts of Chinese origin.
Comically, smaller museums generally have a "take a ton of pictures, share them on social, tell everyone" attitude because they want their name out there in order to drive foot traffic and other support.
Trying to pull up the ladder is something people only do once they're on top.
>It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them.
I think people really don't appreciate just how many artifacts museums have that they don't show to the public, don't document, and largely just sit on and gatekeep. It's especially bad when you consider the movement in museum curation from showing large numbers of artifacts with minimal annotation to smaller numbers of highly annotated more "significant" items.
> (Museums in Italy are the worst, allegedly. They really think they own antiquity.)
They are the worst and they do in fact own antiquity: thanks to some idiotic national law, they can claim rights on stuff that has been public domain for centuries before the copyright was even invented. There was a lot of debate about this after a major museum sued a bunch of fashion brands, see this article for example [1].
This is overreach, the law seems to be pretty much about moral rights, not copyright (which I expected the case to be, with Gauthier's reputation, but actually wasn't?)
I can see how it's inevitable for national symbols to be protected under moral rights, though it becomes tricky when it's foreigners that violate them.
"Subscribing" to the comment, since I would also like to know. I didn't know this thing exists, and it is such a hot topic for me that I kinda contemplated if I could somehow start it myself.
Welcome to France! France is built on the idea that the public can't be trusted, has not really reached adulthood (won't ever) and needs to be coached by an army of civil servants whose job is to protect the State and its finances.
It's not corruption, exactly; it's the idea that the interests of the State are paramount, and everything else doesn't really matter.
If the State sells reproductions of Rodin's work, well then you shouldn't be allowed to, and you certainly aren't entitled to any kind of help.
This whole story shows the exact opposite of what you wrote: it is the Rodin museum, an independent institution which prides itself in being self-sufficient (even when it is not completely true), that is misleading the public and trying to manipulate the state ministry to its help, and the State didn't, and another part of the state ruled against them on almost all counts.
The Musée Rodin is not an "independent institution" at all, it's an "Établissement public national à caractère administratif"[0]: a government entity. The letters[1] are signed by "Catherine Chevillet, Conservateur général du Patrimoine" -- that's a civil servant. And the RMN, alluded to in the post, is also a government entity.
> France is built on the idea that the public can't be trusted, has not really reached adulthood (won't ever) and needs to be coached by an army of civil servants whose job is to protect the State and its finances.
If "nanny state" is an important causal factor explaining why the museums are behaving this way, it suggests other nanny states could see similar museum behavior?
So how are museums in Singapore treating 3D scans?
“Nanny state is a term of British origin that conveys a view that a government or its policies are overprotective or interfering unduly with personal choice. The term likens such a government to the role that a nanny has in child rearing.”
The idea that French people constantly fight for their rights isn't true either; they basically just love rioting. Americans interpret this as noble political activity because Americans have an incorrect belief that protesting is an effective method of political change that comes from misunderstanding Civil Rights/Vietnam protests.
But when you actually see interviews with French rioters you find they're all conspiracy theorists who think they've uncovered French QAnon. Or they're farmers who want even more subsidies and want to get rid of climate policy.
This is just wrong on all levels - French "manifestations" are not limited to the "gilets jaunes", which were a recent phenomenon that already died out. The gilets jaunes were mostly people who never went to a "grève" before, never participated in Labor movements, never joined a "syndicat"...
> Welcome to France! France is built on the idea that the public can't be trusted, has not really reached adulthood (won't ever) and needs to be coached by an army of civil servants whose job is to protect the State and its finances.
Sounds a lot like Germany. One notable exception to this is when the public tries to interact with the government. Then it is expected that citizens are experts in public administration procedures and can decipher deliberately obfuscated language that abuses the passive voice (among other dark patterns) to sound more abstract and inscrutable.
> If's not corruption, exactly; it's the idea that the interests of the State are paramount, and everything else doesn't really matter.
> I'm also surprised at how nonchalantly the french supreme (!!) court seems to cope with the museum just ignoring their two month deadline for three months in the new trial...
The conseil d’État is nothing like a Supreme Court. It is an administrative body, not a court of law. This phrase was used because it was easier than explaining how it actually works to a presumably mostly-American audience. France has a civil law system, there cannot be anything like the American Supreme Court.
> Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
It is not a court, and it does not have the powers American judges have. The role of the Council of State (one of them, anyway, and the relevant one here) is to rule on administrative matters. They cannot decide to fine someone or put someone in jail. They can decide that a government body was wrong on something and make it change, that’s it.
For the purpose of this matter, the Conseil d'État is a court, not an administrative body, it is the highest level and last resort of jurisdiction for administrative law, i.e. the law pertaining to relations between citizens and the State or the local governments. It intervenes as the highest appelate court of administrative tribunals. Its members are judges and their decisions are judgement.
But the Conseil d'État has also many other attributions that are non-jurisdictional.
> They cannot decide to fine someone or put someone in jail.
That's because only criminal court can do that. A divorce court cannot fine someone or put someone in jail. That doesn't make it any less of a court. A civil court doesn't fine, it only grants damages. That doesn't make it any less of a court.
> Its members are judges and their decisions are judgement.
They are civil servants, not magistrates. They don’t have the same independence and are nothing like American judges.
> That's because only criminal court can do that.
That was specifically addressing the contempt of court issue. The Council of State cannot do that. It can make the public institution do something, but it cannot punish the individual. Once the action was deemed illegal, the individual faces disciplinary action from their institution, but the Council does not decide this.
> That doesn't make it any less of a court. A civil court doesn't fine, it only grants damages. That doesn't make it any less of a court.
What makes it not a court in the American sense is that it does not have any magistrate. Commission would be a better word.
You are trying to relate two different legal systems that are don't necessarily have equivalence. The members, although not magistrates, are independent and factually irremovable. When they are in "court" formation as is the case here, they are judges by law, and it is a court. That's where you appeal the decisions of lower judges. Their decisions ("arrêt") are case laws and precedents that affect the entire justice system (in the relations between a citizen and the State).
> That was specifically addressing the contempt of court issue.
There is no such thing as contempt in the US sense, in French courts. The closest would be outrages, which does not apply to the issue in question (delay tactics). Many US legal concepts, even the most basic ones, are simply not transposable to the French system.
They are judges in that they make decisions, but they are not magistrates; they are civil servants. The way it works is also quite different from the cour de cassation. There is not really a prosecution, a defense, or parties civiles. It’s its own thing, partly for philosophical reasons related to separation of powers, and partly for practical reasons under the Ancien Régime. The kings did not want magistrates to interfere with the State, so they created a different judicial branch. Napoléon modernised it but kept the same principle.
I don't think we should be missing the forest for the trees.
Yes, because of historical reasons, _technically_ "magistrat" refers specifically to magistrates from the judicial branch and not all judges [0]. This is surely interesting yet administrative judges do the same job of presiding over court proceedings before them and being independent from the political authorities.
Procedure is different between the two branches, but there are also differences of procedures within each branch - for instance between penal vs civil cases.
The Constitutionnal council has ruled that the independance of administrative judges is a constitutional principle in the same way as the judicial judge [1, see point 6].
[0] of course if we need to be really technical, administrative judges are magistrates see: 'Les membres des tribunaux administratifs et des cours administratives d'appel sont des magistrats [...]' https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000... ; but members of the Conseil d'Etat, an administrative court, are not administrative judges - they're conseillers d'Etat.
> This is surely interesting yet administrative judges do the same job of presiding over court proceedings before them and being independent from the political authorities.
Not really. The fact that members of the Council of State are not magistrates comes up regularly, because it does limit their independence. It works so far because everyone behaves, but this would cause a serious crisis if France one days ends up with someone like Trump or Boris Johnson, who is willing to stop doing the right thing and just use any weapon they can find. To add insult to injury in this case, the supreme body deciding on disciplinary actions in public institutions is the Council of State itself.
> of course if we need to be really technical, administrative judges are magistrates see: 'Les membres des tribunaux administratifs et des cours administratives d'appel sont des magistrats [...]'
This is about the tribunaux administratifs (lower courts) and cours administrative d’appel (appellate courts, the 2nd layer). The conseil d’État sits on top and is different.
There is no supreme court in France, this is a gross mistranslation of "Court de Cassation", which is where you bring your case after you have lost your appeal, and is the last court where you can try to argue your point.
No, it's different in many many ways. And there are not just one, but four courts of last resort in France:
- Cour de Cassation, for civil matters
- Conseil d'État, for matters regarding the administration / the State
- Tribunal des Conflits: tasked with deciding who's right when the Cour de Cassation and the Conseil d'État disagree
- Conseil Constitutionnel: issues rulings about the constitutionality of laws, both new (before they become law) and existing ones (QPC)
This doesn't stop here however; there are two upper courts in the European Union, than can invalidate decisions issued by national courts:
- Court of Justice (in Luxembourg)
- Court of Human Rights (in Strasbourg)
- - -
Edit: Don't you love the idea of "Tribunal des Conflits"? The original idea was that the State could not be brought to court, its decisions being made by "the people" who is the absolute sovereign.
Then France gradually accepted the idea that State's decision could be challenged, and created a whole different judicial system, the "justice administrative". It took a looong time: from 1800 to... 1980. A much simpler approach could have been to let people try their case against the State before the existing courts, but no... much better to build another system with its own rules, its own judges, etc.
An inevitable consequence of having two different systems is that they sometimes disagree. (Another reason why it would have been so much simpler to just have one system.) Since the two systems are sometimes at odds with one another, we created... a third system! This was in 1872, so quite early in the process.
This Tribunal des Conflits is a referee of sorts whose only job is to stop the fights between the two justice systems. I think that's great and tells a lot about the French way of solving problems: just add a new bureaucratic authority on top of all existing ones.
More complexity, but also each of them having less power. Which itself might be a good thing (separation of powers) or a bad thing (inability to stand up against legislative & executive powers).
Note that's it's not civil matters but matters related to government action (from say, basic rights to labor disputes for State employees or citizenship issues).
One difference among many: the Cour de Cassation does not issue decisions, exactly; it can only hold or break a decision from a lower court. If it chooses to break the lower court's decision (casser=to break) then the case is sent back to said court to be decided again, with new guidance from the upper court.
That's also typically how the U.S. Supreme Court works, except for those few oddball cases where it has original jurisdiction. The losing party from the lower court files a petition for certiorari (judicial review). The Supreme Court may grant it, hear the two parties' arguments, and reach an opinion which is sent back to the lower courts, who are then responsible for resolving any remaining questions.
The description was incomplete. The cour de cassation is not supreme at all, there are the Constitutional Council and the Court of Justice of the EU above it. As well as more specialised international courts like the European Court of Human Rights. There is a summary here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_of_France .
In any case, France has a civil law system; there cannot be a court as powerful as the Supreme Court of the US is. Viewing any of these institutions as similar to SCOTUS is bound to create a lot of confusion.
Well the SCOTUS functions are divided among the Cour de cassation (last ditch appeal) and the Conseil Constitutionnel (Checks if a law is in line with the constitution)
"The" supreme court, if one assumes a US-centric definition, comes with a lot of assumptions on the nature of law and the power structure of the various government branches. Which generally do not hold outside of the US and certainly not in France.
So yes, it is "a" supreme court, but that doesn't really help understanding, because it is not "the" supreme court.
One of the things I find really funny about the law is that yeah, just not responding as long as you can or until someone acts to force you to is a common strategy, because it mostly works and adds cost and complexity to holding someone accountable. Some portion of plaintiffs will give up and not pursue even very valid claims if you just make the entire process a slog.
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
>They were basically arguing that they are entitled to hide those scan artifacts to better protect their gift shop?! How can they even reconcile those arguments with preserving the artists legacy/serving the common good?
If the museum folds and the collection gets auctioned off in parts and public access to it is reduced then the common good is not served.
I think this is an asinine argument and they're mostly just protecting their own paychecks but there is a kernel of truth to it.
>I'm also surprised at how nonchalantly the french supreme (!!) court seems to cope with the museum just ignoring their two month deadline for three months in the new trial... Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
We all know that justice is only legally blind, not functionally blind. When you're the favorite or you're state adjacent you get a lot more leeway.
It's not exactly that but it's close. It is: the State is always right, you're wrong, and that's that. The reasoning behind it is that "the State" is 66 million people, and you're just one person, so it's really easy to tell who matters more.
It can be viewed as a perverse interpretation of the trolley problem; but it's impossible to understand France without that information.
That's why people selling train tickets are rude and unpleasant: they represent the national railway system, which is an extension of the State, which is 66 million people, and you're just one person, so fuck you very much.
No need to excuse yourself as a French speaker but not French, the baguettes will indeed unscrupulously bend people over if it serves their own interest without excuses or valid justification.
> Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example.
I’m much less interested in half measures, whereby the public might be granted access
to scans only for, say, educational purposes, but be improperly prohibited from using
them commercially.
Those kinds of compromises undermine the public’s right to reuse public domain works
and can lead to people hesitating to use them in any way because they are unsure of
their rights and fear unknown punishments.
Whereas the licence on that Rosetta Stone scan by the British Museum is indeed "non commercial" only:
License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlikeCC
> ... are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public.
They can still utterly frustrate you in the way they do this. They could fe print them out layer by layer and only show these in a specific "viewing room". I have seen my government (Belgium) use this strategy when it comes to architectural plans. In essence, it's public (you can access them) but it's also rather useless.
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.” '
I guess they want to limit your time with them. If you could study them whenever you want with whatever tools you have, you can easily find conflicts between the plans and the building regulations. This would allow you to block the planned construction works.
Even with the current protocol people find ways to block "progress".
For example, the Oosterweel Link [0], which has been postponed multiple times.
There was an interesting project from the Natural History Museum using a syncatron particle accelerator to 3d scan some part their the famous 300 year old insect collection and make it openly available but that announcement was 2021 and I can't seem to find the results let alone see if they were released to the public.
I've been to an art museum with a large collection of ancient Greek and Egyptian statues. A lot of the statues are damaged, or were painted and the paint has long since worn off.
I'd love to walk through a VR recreation of what they believe the statues looked like when they were new. It balances the need for preservation of what remains, and the need to preserve the subjective interpretation of what the art was meant to be.
I am okay with public information being free to use commercially, with a huge disclaimer though.
Wherever copyright is applicable, the public should retain it, that's what public domain is for. Any derived works, commercial or otherwise should also be in the public domain.
If you fight for "public access" so that you can make your own stuff locked behind a copyright, then you are the hypocrite here.
There's nothing to "retain" once copyright is over (aside from moral rights, which are forever... which I guess becomes questionable after the death of the author ? But moral rights are not transferrable anyway).
Instead for calling to basically blow up the whole legal framework around derivative works, maybe we should focus on bringing copyright terms back to more sane durations (like the original 14 years, renewable once) ?
That seems to benefit large corporations at the expense of smaller artists. Either you focus on making money or some large corporation will swoop in the second you can't and exploit your work for their own profit.
Presumably, once the copyright is allowed to expire, it can't be sold and then reinstated.
I'm okay with large corporations pouring their money at the government to keep copyrights for useless things alive, even if it means we can't legally copy useless things for a bit longer.
> Presumably, once the copyright is allowed to expire, it can't be sold and then reinstated.
Derivative works have their own copyrights. The original book is free for grabs but each movie franchise has it's own copyrights. Likely far more valuable and ones the original artist will never see a cent from.
Exactly, if the clock is ticking for them to bid on it, to buy it off the small business, it gives the small business power, and should also make it easier for the small business to get decent loans/investments.
Btw, if I'm not mistaken, I first read about this proposal in the book "Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society" by Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl
doesn't that just favor the 0.1% who can afford it and fk over the 99.9%? I don't see why we don't just put a hard limit on it, they had many years to make a profit.
an interesting example where this has been problematic is OpenStreetMap. They can't ingest a lot of government data b/c their project requires a relicense with their attribution-requirement (where all users are forced to have an ugly OSM bumper sticker on their maps)
What you call an ugly bumper sticker is credit where it is due, but also an important recruitment mechanism for new mappers, which improves the map. The /copyright page is our biggest landing page on the website, even above the base / page. Attribution is also a requirement of many proprietary map providers.
yes, I've misclicked the hidden link many times as well
The credit is due to the volunteers or governments that created the data, and not the project that collates it (their names are not displayed). The logic behind wikipedia doesn't translate to OSM b/c OSM is providing data to be reused
If this requirement wasn't there in the first place then OSM maps would have been the default go-to map and a household name like wikipedia. You wouldn't need to force an ad in every map to self-promote.
> Attribution is also a requirement of many proprietary map providers
the project had the opportunity to do something truly different and unique and chose not to... what a missed opportunity.
I'm genuinely curious why this is a sore spot for you, since I've never heard this perspective. It seems like you see the key difference as being that the OSM attribution is commonly clickable, whereas the Google Maps one is not (similar font/placement). (Actually Google Maps does have "Terms" clickable. Random example of website embedding it: https://www.belcourt.org/directions-and-map/ or see https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/get-s...)
Meanwhile OSM says that you may "fade/collapse the attribution ... automatically on map interaction" among other possibilities (https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guideline...). It being licensed the way it is, you can use Leaflet.js or whatever else instead of the copy they host, if you really don't like their iframe...
I don't use Google maps, so I'm honestly not really sure what their terms are
I guess in the big picture it just rubs me the wrong way a bit. I just find it mildly absurd that if I take a screenshot of OSMand on my phone and send it to a friend, that I've broken the law. It'd like to live in a world where that's not the case.
It's like if Project Gutenburg mandated everyone had to include a cover page with their name on every book they distribute. It doesn't make it unusable or horrible, but it's just a general feeling "ah, so close but they missed the mark".
It could have been a truly open repository of data and instead it's just so slightly not that (and in a way that's so minor that no one will ever bother to re-make a truly no-strings-attached version :) )
Wait, what? If the government source is public domain, OSM (or anyone else) can take it and derive from it and can then impose whatever license OSM wants, including an attribution requirement. Did you mean the other way around?
Actually OSM's license is so weak on the attribution it requires, that OSM does not ingest CC-BY data, because OSM believes their further distribution would not satisfy CC-BY's attribution requirement.
The parent comment was talking about wanting a system where "Any derived works, commercial or otherwise should also be in the public domain" so I was talking to that.
I assume when you say "government" you mean the US government. But in other countries it often doesn't work that way. You can't redistribute government maps with more restrictions. I went to a talk about this from an OSM developer here in Taiwan. OSM tries to lobby for the maps to be redistributed under different terms so they can ingest them
This is not the most outrageous thing about taxpayer money at work that I learned today.
That would be the fact that local branches of the ministry of agriculture require wind turbine builders to put blue dyed water in concrete to make it friendly to all life or something, I'm not sure I understand, it's called Pneumatit®, and I'm not making this up.
It's biodynamics, it's biogeology (neither biology nor geology, not an actual science, it's more like dowsers). It's not only about wind turbines, it's in so many buildings now, but because it's not only approved but required on some public projects, it's... interesting. It's homeopathy for concrete, and like homeopathy in France, it'll receive government subsidies for far longer than it should.
I was slightly annoyed starting to read your comment, because "who cares what this guy learned today? these people are obstructing aggregation of knowledge, let's focus on that!", but after googling this "Pneumatit®" stuff…
> Concrete with Pneumatit® is different. The experience of Pneumatit® rooms is described as warm, wide, free, soft, relaxing, breathing. Because Pneumatit®, a liquid additive, permanently anchors a fine biological activity (liveliness) in concrete - and in all other building materials based on cement and anhydrite.
I don't even know, what to say, this is the most absurd thing I've seen in a long time. I'm chuckling right now, but the fact, that some country enforces using it… It's truly mindblowing.
P.S.
Could you please source some regulation or something where it says you have to use Pneumatit®? Cannot find it myself, and the fact that French ministry of agricultureenforces it is a bigger part of the story than the product itself.
Pneumatit® is a liquid additive that permanently anchors a fine biological activity (liveliness) in the concrete
Many people experience adverse effects that come from concrete - regardless of the design. This ranges from slightly subliminal discomfort to irritability, inner cold sensations, joint pain, exhaustion and organic disorders. Underlying such sensations is a reality, because the production of cement breaks through the bottom of the natural processes of life. Result: a lifeless building material with an absorbing effect on our organism [0].
This stuff is apparently made from small bird femurs and nautilus shells grounded into powder, then add water, then diluted a million times so that they can sell olympic pools of the thing without running out of raw material. It's textbook homeopathic dilution.
> The end product, ready for use, has the homeopathic format D7. This is another reason why Pneumatit® does not have any physical or chemical influence on the building material.
It seems like this YouTube video [1] is the source. I don’t speak French, so someone else will have to comment on veracity. I think it hinges on a phone interview in the last third of the video, so please look at that.
I just did some initial snooping, thinking the manufacturers of the product would be some French people with some backdoor connection with the ministry of agriculture, but as far as I can tell, it is provided by some seemingly unrelated German company.
Is this something that is distasteful, but needs to be done to prevent some group from picketing the installation of the wind turbines?
I'm also a French taxpayer, I regret coming back to France every time I read about something stupid they do with our money. This Pneumatit thing is really something.
The British art journal has run a long campaign to establish that (a) museum photographs of out of copyright works cannot be copyrighted and (b) the schemes to sell such reproductions don’t even break even financially
This is an astonishing account. I should no longer be amazed when governmental, or quasi-governmental, bodies abuse their authority in defiance of the law or reason, but it's absolutely baffling.
Peripheral, but related: one of my favorite genre of YouTube video is that of people who quietly assert their civil rights to, e.g., stand in front of City Hall with a cardboard sign, or record video inside City Hall or a public library or other public building, or record anything at all on video from a public sidewalk, or criticize the mayor at a town meeting, all completely legal and protected activity in the USA. Astonishing, the number of times a civil servant or police officer will attempt to run these people off under threat of arrest, exposing themselves and their town to a federal lawsuit.
Invariably, without an ounce of self reflection, they frame these people as troublemakers, as no doubt does the Rodin Museum to Cosmo Wenman, even as the courts thump them.
That jumped out to me as well, particularly given the otherwise high quality of the writing. It's an example of what I perceive as a more general phenomenon - spelling errors, particularly confusion of uncommon homonyms[note], appear to have increased in frequency. I previously attributed it to the internet simply lowering the bar for "publishing" to the less educated, and the greater proportion of text that makes it to our eyeballs without the intercession of an editor - but seeing such a glaring mistake in a text clearly written by someone with otherwise very good command of the language makes me wonder if there are other factors, perhaps the rise of verbal media such as audiobooks, podcasts, and YouTube channels.
[note: I see "fazed" spelled as "phased" more often than I see it spelled correctly now. I suspect its proper spelling will eventually die out.]
It has taken me a long time to let go of "to beg the question" as exclusively meaning "to employ circular reasoning" and not cringe when I see it used to mean "to raise the question".
What gave me calm to accept such changes is understanding that the language we use today is a result of such changes. Awful once meant full of awe and now means very bad or unpleasant. Nice no longer means foolish and now means pleasant. Girl referred to a young person of either gender and now specifically means a female child. Silly once meant happy or fortunate and now means foolish or absurd. Meat once referred to food of all kinds, not just animal flesh. I imagine there were people who experienced these changes with some despair. But everything's okay. English is still expressive and meaningful. The sky has not fallen. The center holds.
Note also the different meaning to "to table" (in a political context) between England and the US. One means "to put on the table for consideration" while the other means "take out of consideration and set it aside on the table"
It's also very timely: next week I have arriving a portable 3D scanner (an Einstar Vega) precisely because as a hobbyist sculptor the only way I can analyze these works to inform my practice is to go to galleries and scan the works myself (sometimes very surreptitiously!). It's crazy that I need to buy a £2000 piece of equipment and produce have a tonne of CO2 just to be able to look at a piece of art from x00 years ago on my computer.
Photogrammetry is great with textured, consistently lit, opaque objects.
Blank white plaster, less so. You really want some kind of microtexture to grab on to for it to be anywhere close to a structured light scanner. That may mean you want a macro lens and a thousand exposures because you're grabbing on to microscopic surface roughness or dust. Not necessarily easy to do surreptitiously.
Yes they are different things and photogrammetry isn't a replacement for a "real" 3d scanner. But this is about museums which largely aren't unlit plain white surfaces. Getting models of museum objects is generally doable by anyone without thousands in specialised equipment. Taking a video or pictures is a lot less weird than pulling out any scanner.
Do you have any software recommendations? I tried a few photogrammetry apps to capture small items (e.g., keycaps) and bigger ones (e.g., my face) but the results were never good enough. Ideally, I would like to open such models in Fusion, make a few edits, and 3D print them.
Given that the museum has ignored all court orders and deadlines and faced no repercussions, what exactly do they expect will happen when the Supreme Court too rules against the museum? Until these court rulings have teeth, it just makes a fun article to read.
A short jail term for the person who heads the museum might motivate them to act better
I love the idea of preserving history through 3D scans. When I learned about Gobekli Tepe a few years ago it caught my heart, and since then I've been wishing that someone would produce a detailed 3D scan of the site. Does anyone know if there's any company, group, or non-profits trying to make this happen for key historical landmarks? Most people are unlikely to be able to visit such locations, and they probably can't handle that many visitors, so making a digital version seems like a great compromise.
I haven’t played all the games but the recent ones I tried had a historical tour mode where you get to explore day-in-the-life of an Ancient Greek city or Viking village, with people going about their routines working, trading, farming, gathering. With VR it would be the closest thing to time travel we currently have.
And they do have many of the historical landmarks in pretty stunning detail, with drapes and paintings of what it most probably looked like back then.
I have also made inquiries into the illiberal terms of access and use for the Stanford David/Michelangelo scans. The situation there—partly due to the influence of Italian cultural authorities, partly due to the indifference of every other institution involved, including Stanford and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation—is just as dumb and frustrating as in France. Those incredibly valuable, important scans are effectively orphaned and likely will remain so until someone who has the complete collection puts it on Pirate Bay.
Why exactly is non-commercial open access problematic?
I think the author is going overboard by framing this as some kind of righteous crusade for the public access. After all, he is interested in making profit from this. Sure, public funding paid for it, so then why should the profits be privatized?
There is no privatization here (moving the scans from public domain to private), the author is seeking the opposite, shifting the scans to the public unencumbered.
Yes, to be commercialized and privatized by the author. Somehow all of the "open access projects" on the authors website seem to be concerned with releasing 3D models scanned by others, and not you know, his own projects. I don't see any commitments to publish derived work and such.
I know that the story of an independent artist fighting a big bureaucratic public institutions is something that would get a lot of sympathy here, but this really isn't that much of a "David and Goliath" kind of tale. French heritage and research entities are underfunded and understaffed, they don't have competent lawyers, or indeed funding to afford those, as we can clearly see from this case. One litigation-happy American can run circles around them and profit from it too.
If as soon as the heritage work gets 3D scanned with French public funds, it will immediately get scooped and monetized by private sector, wouldn't the ultimate outcome be that less objects get scanned? Why would the museums even bother fighting for the digitization grant funds?
You're quite right, actually "privatization" would be a wrong term here, but I feel like my point still stands.
I am completely supportive of the release of the cultural heritage digitisations into the public domain, and I think mandating a release under the non-commercial license would be a good solution. Equally, I think it should be possible to license these for commercial use, at a reasonable price.
What I was trying to say with my "privatization" bit, is that the author did not intend to buy the scans from the museum, but definitely intends to monetize them, and sell the derived work, without commitment to put that work into the public domain. For me this very obvious profit motive seems incompatible with the image of the defender of the public rights that the author tries to cultivate.
And once again, I think we have to take into account that forcing the public institutions to give away their 3D scans, without cutting them in at least a little bit, will simply put a stop to the scanning campaigns.
"Public funding" is usually allocated for a specific purpose, as in, covering the cost of the scanning itself and after a lengthy bureaucratic process too. It's not free money.
The museums are deathly afraid of losing control over their collections, it's their main income generator. Why would the museum admin even bother going through with the 3D scanning projects, if they don't get to keep at least some commercial rights?
Great read and an important battle for an open society.
It strongly reminds me of universities and their model to sell papers to the public after the public already paid for their creation. Hopefully this ruling will somehow help in that regard to open up publicly funded work.
There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it.
When I see some of the virtual reconstructions of Ancient Rome or Pompeii, I wonder if the real thing will be of less interest than the reconstituted, repaired one.
I think this is normal - there are now billions of people in the world and only so much "great art". I was in a huge crowd looking at the Mona Lisa. There was nothing magical about the experience. I'd rather have my own copy or put my VR glasses on and enjoy it in, say, the house where it was first displayed.
I can see museums fearing the loss of visitors or at least fearing that someone else will make billions out of virtualising it and they won't. I mean, search engines make billions out of the knowledge other people built over centuries. AI takes open source information and code and makes billions selling the embodied knowledge that was given away for free. It's not as if corporations aren't happy to rape the commons and call themselves heroes for doing it.
This isn't a good reason for the museum's attitude but I don't look to the future free exploitation of public information with unalloyed optimism.
> There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it.
For certain things, I could see that. But for many things I go see, it's being there that is part of the point. Knowing that I'm seeing or touching the actual thing the artist saw and touched, or standing in a place where the builders worked build it, etc. Seeing a perfect representation misses that.
I half agree, but I've been to a few of these things and it's all somewhat debatable because you're not really supposed to touch, or there are millions of people and you can't just sit and enjoy, or you don't know enough about them to understand deeply what you are seeing.
Ruined cities really don't look or feel anything like what they were. You miss an incredible amount by not being able to see them as the inhabitants would have. On the other hand you see the countryside and when that hasn't changed (e.g. the sea moving out) you get a feeling of context but .... even that is odd when the original people that lived there are long gone and a totally different culture has supplanted them. You smell the smells of the plants at least and that's good.
OTOH I can imagine the virtual part of this becoming incredibly good - with smell and touch even. Imagine lying in your Roman house in Pompeii and eating dinner while reclining. Listening to the street noise outside while enjoying the garden in your courtyard? I can imagine putting yourself inside the historical context to a degree that would require an extreme feat of imagination in the real place.
With paintings it's just the crowd, often being on your feet and the comical way in which one's favorite painting turns out to be tiny in real life and much worse than the print for that reason.
Some people have of course tried to do something like this. I specifically remember some video about getting street noise right... I think it was for that Assassin's Creed game set in Paris ?
> Ruined cities really don't look or feel anything like what they were. You miss an incredible amount by not being able to see them as the inhabitants would have.
Oh I totally agree with this! And I'd say it applies similarly to modern cities. I find it sort of hilarious to go somewhere like London which has a huge amount of historical architecture, but so surrounded by modernity that you get a little whiplash every time you turn around.
I have to get as close as I can to what I'm looking at, preferably close enough to mostly shut out the existence of everyone around, the noise, etc.
I think you make very good points. I would love the virtual experience that tried to show what it was really like at the time these artifacts were created. I'd still enjoy the part about seeing it all in person, though, because that's just me -- being in the presence of the physical object really sparks my imagination. So ... I want both options, please.
It probably depends a lot on personality. For myself, I obsessively studied space exploration history as a child. When I was much older, I toured National Air and Space Museum in District of Columbia and found it terribly boring, no new knowledge, nothing I hadn't read about before.
I can see your point of view. It definitely is going to depend on what you are going for. I've never gone to a museum for knowledge. I enjoyed the Smithsonian (though, aside from a few specific artifacts, I really prefer Udvar-Hazy to the museum on the mall) solely because of the feeling I got being in the presence of the actual machines that I've learned so much about. Reading about Glamorous Glennis or the Enola Gay is one thing, but to stand in front of it and think "that right there is the actual plane Chuck Yeager flew past mach 1" is 100% of why I go to the museum.
I don't think public funding necessarily means that the output should be publicly available. The benefits and risks should be evaluated, as they were in this case.
The results of public funding of weapons programmes and surveillance satellites are understandably concealed, this museum situation is analogous despite the risks being significantly less consequential.
> The court noted that musée Rodin had obviously created its 3D scans in the context of its public service mission .... the judges specifically reasoned against musée Rodin’s trade secrecy claim by citing its 3D digitization funding applications to the Ministry of Culture, in which the museum stipulated its commitment to publishing its scans. The museum had attempted to hide these funding applications from us and the court, telling the court they did not exist. However, in the course of the trial we obtained those applications by forcing a parallel documents request directly to the Ministry of Culture — which the museum complained to the court was a "crude maneuver" — exposing the museum’s deception and badly wounding the defense on this critical issue.
Wow. If this went down as depicted, I'd be pretty disgusted with the museum if I was a citizen there.
So, we have one of those uncommon cases where wealth (here in the form access to culture) actually can trickle down, and our government (among other parties) is actively preventing it.
Though that’s not surprising from neo-liberal government who thinks pretty much everything should be privatised. They are after all quite explicitly about favouring the rich, and cutting off mass access to those bits of culture is but a small part of their plan to maintain and expand inequality.
I suspect the true rationale may be more deeply based on art history than either the museum or this article are letting on. To understand why, I think it's important to reckon with what happened to "art" as an institution when the processes of reproduction became cheap and readily available during the 1900s. I can only sketch and I won't fully do it justice.
Before the 1900s, some methods of mechanical reproduction did exist. These methods could be used to mechanically reproduce the written word and very specific forms of visual media. But one factor governed the creation of reproducible works: the work had to be made in a format that permitted reproduction. Put another way, the author of a work must have designed their work for reproduction, implicitly or explicitly consenting to it.
For example, a Japanese wood block carver chooses to make a wood block rather than draw directly on the page; this deliberate choice creates the means of mechanical reproduction. Even when this is done, the choice to do so often comes at prohibitive cost, and while the cost of reproduction is reduced, it remains nontrivial.
But for the rest of art and artists, exclusivity was not just implied, it was an expected standard. There is only one Mona Lisa. It was made in so-and-so year by so-and-so. Around this grew a nearly occult tradition of reverence for the individual, as expressed through their work - their true work, the one in front of you, unique and inviolable.
Through the 1900s artists were reckoning with the creation of film, and later, digital media. I won't rehash all these arguments. Suffice it to say that one main challenge was to the ethos of art itself. If the work is infinitely reproducible, then where has the artist gone? Today, anyone who wants to see the Mona Lisa has already done so. The original is a mere novelty, except to certain very rare specialists. This has only grown more true with digital media, as the ease of reproduction and fidelity have both increased dramatically.
Among a certain type of art culture enthusiast, or maybe dogmatist, there remains a belief that art has lost something material as a result of its reproducibility. And it is undeniably a reasonable belief that if people are provided the requisite data, they will, eventually, reproduce the artwork to a satisfactory degree.
To many of these people, call them any jeers you want, sculpture remains one of the last bastions where the occult value surrounding the artist, who made the work, has not been diminished, because no one has yet figured out how to mechanically reproduce a sculpture to a high degree of fidelity.
Certain museums hold this as a guiding principle, because it is their interpretation of what "art" is supposed to culturally mean. A 3D scan of a sculpture destroys that final bastion of sanctity against the oncoming tide of reproducible devaluation.
Now, I don't believe this argument is a good one. Frankly I think it's a bit Pollyanna, but I have to acknowledge I set it up so I could be strawmanning it a bit. But the reason we're not likely to hear it here is because, despite (what I suspect to be) its central importance to the Rodin, it is not, at its core, a legitimate legal argument.
You are trying to insist on the "reproduced for cheap", I guess, because I'm pretty sure that expensive reproductions (whether legal or illegal, frauded as "real" or not) of paintings and statues have existed for a long time ?
Sort of? There's also a key difference between reproductions that create a physical object (often but not always done for fraudulent purposes), and "essentially anyone can display a reasonable image of the Mona Lisa at any time of day, wherever they are in the world." Digital reproduction of non-digital media is where this problem gets thorniest because the cost of reproduction is at its lowest, and access to reproduction is at its highest.
"In response to the museum’s nonsensical technological claims, we submitted expert testimony from Professor Michael Kazhdan, full professor of computer graphics in the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and co-developer of the Poisson Surface Reconstruction algorithm, which is used worldwide in 3D scan data analysis. Professor Kazhdan explained to the court that documents in plaintext format are fundamentally well suited for preserving scan data, and that such documents are easily exploitable by experts and amateurs alike."
Yes. Yes. That must've felt satisfying.
"In response to Musee Rodin's nonsense, we present here the inventor of the basic techniques of 3D scanning, Dr. Kazhdan, from John Hopkins..."
What I feel about this is similar to what I feel about government-sponsored research institutes and universities not releasing their research to the public...
If you get money from the government, society is paying for your work so it's entitled to it.
Oh, you want to keep the data for yourself? DON'T ask or accept money from us the people.
Data *should* be free, but in an age where predatory corps crawl the web to train models they hide behind paywalls, having control over your data means being able to explicitly give them to those that serve the common good.
I used to be sympathetic to causes such as this, but in the advent of the plunder of our digital cultural heritage I have become skeptical.
Why should proprietary AI get data payed for by the french tax payer?
> in private, RMN admits it won’t release its scans because it wants to protect its gift shops’ sales revenue from competition from the public making their own replicas.
The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position...
As if it would be more difficult to just buy the thing from the gift shop and make copies of that. With a physical object you can make molds directly from that without having to figure out how to turn a point-cloud file into a physical object.
It's a pretty bad argument even besides the lack of legal relevance.
Except it turns out they also make basically no money from this right now - it's not a meaningful portion of their funding or other monetary support.
This is actually true of most large art museums. SF MoMa makes only 7% of revenue (not actual dollars in funding) from their gift shop and that number only goes in one direction over the years.
Smaller art museums often depend more but that is also changing.
It's also an argument, that even if you granted all there premises - could be quantifiable.
If the gift shop makes $x per year in toto, and some percentage is (or could be) 3D scans, you now have a maximum dollar amount that they can possibly be worth (by calculating the cost of a perpetual annuity). Can't be more - and so even in the worst case you've changed it from a "we will never" to a "we want $x before we do" question.
No, that's why the author is using freedom of information laws to accomplish his goals. If you are a government institution - and these museums are - in a country with freedom of information laws, then it follows that you can be compelled to comply with them by the courts.
It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.)
I was initially sympathetic to the museum, as it's common for public funding to be tight, and revenue from the gift shop or commercial licencing of their objects can fill the gap. I don't know about France, but I expect the ministry has been heavily pushing public museums to increase their income in this way.
However, that doesn't justify the deception described by the article.