On: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

[justinclift]

> 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.

Attempting that just now from the linked page: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-rosetta-stone-1e03509704...

Note that Sketchfab is a 3rd party crowd (not the British Museum), and trying to download that model requires signing up for a Sketchfab account.

So while it's kind of "public access", that's only while Sketchfab is still around and still requires giving this random place your details.

It's better than nothing, but not exactly fantastic for a public institution to be doing.

[sadeshmukh → justinclift]

At least you can download it. They can't undownload it once you have it, and people can distribute from what they have.

[autoexec → sadeshmukh]

It'd be nice if they got uploaded to archive.org or somewhere else where the public can get it without handing over a bunch of data.

[justinclift → autoexec]

Good idea. Are you up for uploading it and the other models?

There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of them, so it probably do-able in a few hours. Or maybe even faster if scripted?

[justinclift → sadeshmukh]

Yeah, thus my "better than nothing" wording. :)

Interestingly, also from the article:

  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