I really want to understand the perspective of the other side of this case. Why did this museum care so much about this issue? They appear to have put an enormous legal effort into preventing the release of these point cloud scans. Why?
Because they are snobby gatekeepers who think making art more accessible would dilute their value. These sorts are very common in the art and academia world.
Or because they are ignorant, scared and facing a technological disruption that might threaten the value of the original, which is the very reason the museum exists. You get a similar dynamic with over-enthusiastic corporate takedown notices.
I read it like this: the museum wanted to safely preserve the original so they made a digital copy and hid it in a drawer. The author pointed out this was not lawful, and the museum panicked because they intended it as a digital copy protected similarly to the original. So, commendations to the appeals court for identifying the key philosophical issue; regrets that they ignored the actual law.
Or more likely because they make money from selling small replicas of the sculptures in the museum store, and don't want to undercut that by making it trivial for everyone in the world to 3d print their own.
Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.
What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.
It states in the article *[our lawyer] advised us that [...] the judges would be extremely deferential to the Rodin Museum and would grant it the benefit of any doubts* but doesn't dare to say why they would be deferential.... It's probably because these high level cultural institutions basically get to do whatever they want... France definitely loves their institutions.
I think the part that stands out is how at least one court went out of its way to invent a new argument on behalf of the museum. I was surprised to learn this is actually somewhat common in French law. The court itself, at least with cases involving administrative actions, has every right to step in like this. It is not a neutral arbiter.
Is the museum supposed to have such a monopoly? Because then the ruling would be disappointing but ultimately not incoherent.
What's the law like on photographs? Those are effectively equivalent are they not? Or does the entire argument hinge on the fact that point clouds can be stored in a human readable format?
> Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.
You're badly confused. The scans are not a financial asset, and they don't even try to make money on them.
From Cosmo Wenman's earlier exploits:
> In August 2016, with the help of the Berlin-based attorney and law professor Kristoff Ritlewski, I sent the Egyptian Museum a request for the scan, citing German freedom of information laws
> The museum quickly referred the matter to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's state museums. The foundation—known in German as the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK)—is one of the largest cultural organizations in the world. When it received my records request, it acknowledged the existence of the Nefertiti scan and acknowledged that the organization was required by law to give me access to it. But it also declared that directly giving me copies of the scan data would threaten its commercial interests. The Egyptian Museum sells expensive Nefertiti replicas in its gift shop, and it implied that it needs to protect that revenue to finance its ongoing digitization efforts.
> In museum-world parlance, this argument against open access is known as "the gift shop defense."
> I asked them to reconsider their position, and to prioritize the benefits to the public of open access over gift shop revenue.
> I also made a new freedom of information request, this time for info about that revenue. I asked for records of their revenue from the sales of replicas of any artifacts, including the Bust of Nefertiti, that were derived from their scans. I asked for records of revenue from the licensing of any of their scan data to third parties. And I asked for any records that demonstrated how that revenue was directed to digitization projects. Finally, I asked them if they would accept a financial donation in exchange for making their Nefertiti data freely available to the public and, if so, what their price was.
> SPK's response, five months later, was revealing.
> SPK confirmed it had earned less than 5,000 euro, total, from marketing the Nefertiti scan, or any other scan for that matter. SPK also admitted it did not direct even that small revenue towards digitization, explaining that it was not obliged to do so.
The fact that another museum tried to avoid giving out scans because the museum felt it would impact their gift shop sales supports the parent's claim about the museum's motivations, not refutes it.
Did you read the quotes? They tried to avoid giving out scans by saying that they felt it would impact their gift shop sales. But we know that they were lying about this, because they had no gift shop sales to impact.
>reclassified point clouds as non-document materialast
Someone needs to make "FOI-B-Gone," an app that bidirectionally converts arbitrary PDFs into one of these (apparently) magically un-FOI-able point cloud documents.
Just "emboss" the text into 3D space, write that to a 3D file, and voila no more pesky fourth estate oversight! Watergate, eat your heart out...
After reading the article, my interpretation isn't that they put an enormous legal effort into combating the release of the scans, it's that they put very little work into fighting against the OP, made a lot of bad arguments and knew from the start they would get away with it.
It comes off a little bit like they made a lazy decision at the outset, didn't want to reverse course to save face and knew they didn't need to back it up with anything....
I would go as far as to say the museum was negligent (by their own admission) and lazy, assuming (rightly so) the judicial system would protect them. Wild stuff.
IMO, their collected filings, both in the Paris tribunal and in the Conseil d'État, are a true trainwreck.
I don't discount the possibility that they were lazy (it seems likely) but I also think they may be truly incompetent and genuinely indifferent to the law, and without a doubt they behaved and argued in bad faith throughout.
I ask myself that with every FOIA request. If I had a dollar for every internal email I obtained saying that the public body intended to ignore the FOIA and make me sue for access, I would certainly be able to buy a sandwich.
Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.
There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.
My guess is that citizen's freedom (of information) places a compulsion (of fulfillment) on the body being summoned, and our natural inclination has always been to resist being compelled.
It may have been a mistake to phrase the FOIA process to the affected bodies as "you must share" rather than "you now have the tools and process to share".
One of my first real interactions with a public body was filing a FOI request to a local council. I'm still a little shocked that they made me fight it all the way to the regulator.
I think it harms the ego of the government workers to think they are effectively of lower status than a random citizen who can ask for them to account for themselves
I often have the experience of going to a museum, seeing a painting I like, and then not being able to find any image of it online - let alone a highres scan. In my casual searches I've found museums generally don't share high resolution scans of their collections. Try to find high resolution images of famous, but not super famous paintings. It's often virtually impossible.
I remember in college my art history professor had a personal digital collection of high quality scans that he'd procure somehow that were impossible to find online. The data seems to be highly guarded, I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise
So my impression is that the Rodin Museum is not really the exception here
> I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise
I doubt it. How much merchandise relies on high quality 3D scans?
I think the real reason is that a lot of people are naturally paranoid control freaks. Their instinct is that these scans should be secret and they never really think beyond that.
>I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise
Weird that anyone would care, since most of those works are presumably public domain. Is it not the legal right, in most of the Western world, of the public to reproduce such works, let alone to use them as elements in their own work?
Yeah, it would probably be legal to take a picture in the museum and make merchandise, but the museum isn't going to actively help you by giving you a scan.
Well, that's the crux of the issue, isn't it? The museum has possession of the scans, but do they - should they - own them? Or are they resources that the public has a right to access?
The exceptional Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections at the Rijksmuseum:
"We’re a public institution, and so the art and objects we have, are, in a way, everyone’s property… With the internet, it’s so difficult to control your copyright or use of images that we decided we’d rather people use a very good high-resolution image from the Rijksmueum rather than using a very bad reproduction… If they want to have a Vermeer on their toilet paper, I’d rather have a very high-quality image of Vermeer on toilet paper than a very bad reproduction."
I have a friend in museum management and I socialize with their museum friends.
A frequent topic of discussion is how hard it can be to get things on display. Many people in museum related roles view their job first as protecting and preserving the displays at all costs, with presenting them to the public as an unfortunate necessity that they’re forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who don’t want the best or most valuable works to be put on display or loan because that risks damaging them.
I would have thought that high resolution copies and archives of art would be a dream come true for these people, but from what I’ve observed many of them oppose that as well. They feel it provides an inauthentic or incomplete sense of their valued works, while also diminishing their profession of preserving these items. When you view yourself as the gatekeeper for a special, irreplaceable treasure, anything that produces a facsimile of that treasure is an abomination that must be resisted.
Some professions seem especially prone to this priesthood mindset. Inward-looking, amplified self-regard, and dedicated to a mission that nobody asked them to take on, because the new mission is more gratifying and ego-boosting.
Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.
This is not even rare or just in niche professions - this is everywhere, and perhaps even the default if not actively fought. I always found it dishonourable myopic.
Nietzsche said that the priests are the enemies, and I'm starting to think he was on to something.
And in natural history museums their primary purpose isn't to show little Jimmy a T. rex skeleton but to preserve the fossils and other specimens for scientific research.
A lot of them have the majority of their collections offsite in warehouses. The "museum" is a sort of front office meant for visitors, but visitors only ever see a tiny fraction of the collection.
"A museum" is already a lot more than visitors can see. As stated they generally only show a tiny fraction of their collections and besides that many museums employ dozens of full time researchers who use the collections to do analyses and publish papers. It is as prestigious to be faculty at the Field Museum in Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, or the Smithsonian in DC as it is at a major university. But without visitors it is hard to bring in money either directly or indirectly.
Not exactly. If this was the sole goal then there wouldn’t be a museum at all.
The museum literally exists because they’re expected to display some things.
The preservationists who fight against showing anything wish the museum part didn’t exist. They want it all to be a big warehouse where nobody can see anything.
The museum's purpose is to preserve the artwork and scanning it furthers that purpose.
Their purpose is not to display the artwork and sharing the scans would take away from their purpose. If other people are already preserving the artwork, they have no need for you to do it too.
Surely their purpose is both? I haven’t read the specific stipulations Rodin put on this museum he founded but I assume he didn’t mean for them to not display his works.
I suppose I don’t think a lot on museums and their operation.
Sibling comment gets at the detail better, but it seems museums have dual roles: display some works for the public and preserve a much greater archive of work for progeny (?).
The public interest in viewing stuff doesn’t sound like it gets nearly the cachet as being ones who get to actually be close to the works.
FWIW, this sounds somewhat similar to ROM or many other digital “rarity” communities online.
I remember this happening in the Dave Matthews Band online community in the aughts (oddly specific but yes people with recordings that led to say the full leak of what became Busted Stuff) or to be one of the few who had heard a copy of “Build you a house.”
More recently I saw evidence of hoarding / gatekeeping in leaks of clean (master?) individual tracks from studio recordings of major artists.
I seem to remember celerity photo leak scandals that began as some kind of insiders only type thing.
I mention these examples because the human condition to hoard or derive power over the control of content is not unique to museum administrators.
That said, physical copies of rare human art are undoubtedly worth protecting.
However, I find the protection of digital descriptions of the works, especially given comment that they are likely not even unique, galling and not dissimilar to all the gate keeping examples I provided above.
Just guessing but museums are always fund-raising through grants and looking for ways to expand their mission and justify larger budgets. Digital preservation through new 3D scanning technology seems like ideal grant-fodder.
At the time, the thought they could be compelled through FOI to provide the scan data to the masses who pay their salaries probably never occured to them. Instead of seeing the scans as an opportunity to share the museum's collection more widely (supposedly a core part of their educational mission), they see them as a threat to their defacto monopoly.
Imo there’s a significant historical benefit in having a “snapshot” of a piece. It could degrade, be preserved incorrectly, be moved incorrectly and broken minorly or majorly. In any case you can go back in time to at verify what it’s state was then.
Excerpts from the museum's applications to the Ministry of Culture, seeking public funds for scanning its collection, statements that it reiterated over several years of renewed funding requests:
"The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."
"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."
Moreover, the Ministry of Culture's call for projects expressly emphasized that one of the main objectives of this program was to promote "free and open consultation of digital cultural resources for all Internet users"
(These statements are from the museum's applications and the Ministry's call for digitization projects, which are linked in the body of my story.)
It’s not a totally crazy idea to insist that certain artworks should only be viewed in certain ways. I’m reminded of David Lynch saying something similar about watching movies on your phone:
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a few artists whose works are somewhat belittled by being digitized and viewed on a screen: Monet and Rothko. Both have monumental size paintings that really don’t work if you aren’t there in person. But since the only way most people interact with them is via a screen, they are often criticized (Rothko specifically.)
So in other words, some art necessarily has a physical dimension which cannot be appreciated in a non-physical way.
Rodin has been dead for a long time, and the museum is obviously the closest thing to his representative. He specifically donated the buildings and his work to the French state on the condition that they make it a museum of his work.
Lynch also wasn’t talking about only his movies, he was talking about cinema as a whole.
I mean, the museum setting is an arbitrary middle ground between the initial intended presentation (a 19th century salon or 20th century gallery showing, in specific physical spaces, likely to be attended by specific people) and wherever and at whatever fidelity that initial presentation is reproduced. What's impure enough to be verboten? No thumbnails in museum brochures or online? Do we restrict entrance to the demographic that was initially present? Are we allowed to light them with modern fixtures? Must the air in the gallery be a reproduction of Paris or New York's historical smog?
An artist's intent should be respected, sure, but I do wonder how much of it is that, and how much of it is a sort of elitism and gatekeeping from people who are not the artist.
Musée Rodin, 2010-2013:
"The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."
I’m curious for your thoughts on my other comment: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955346">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955346
It doesn't seem outrageous to me though that there exists a category of documents more detailed and sensitive than "administrative" documents.
Because you could use the point clouds to make great reproductions. iPhones could make make these point clouds soon anyway.
Of course, reproductions are how basically how all of his statues we see today were made anyway, using and scaling up the clay sculptures. The musee rodin still makes authorized “original” reproductions, up to 12 can be called original. These are authorized by the musee rodin, and account for 30-45 percent of their annual budget.
So a perfect point cloud could be used to make your own molds, and from their your own bronze statues. I wouldn’t call it “counterfeit” because that’s basically how they were done even back in the day, and why there are many “authentic/original/authorised” Thinkers/etc across the world.
Probably at some point walking around with an iPhone will be good enough to make a near indistinguishable point cloud, so the result of this legal process could be kinda moot unless they stop folks from using iPhones near the statues all over the world.
You should see Pixal3D. You don't even need a time-of-flight laser anymore. Images are enough. In fact, this sort of thing + image generation, and soon video generation, have lead to workflows that result in both 3D and 4D (time series 3D) gaussian splats.
From my perspective, having high resolution scans or even 3D scans could undermine the role of the museums. Their role is to provide the best environment to view, to experience and to appreciate the works of the artists. A casual viewing at home, from a computer cannot provide that optimal experience and almost certainly will reduce the wish to visit the museum in person. Much like a recording of a concert or an opera cannot replace a in-person experience but (unfortunately?) is the default way for pop music. Much of that experience is how we mentally, emotionally and physically prepared ourselves for the experience.
Museums want to prevent that and also ensure their own existence.
PS: in this specific case, the museum has to worry about counterfeit copies of Rodin works as well. But I don’t want to succulents on that as I don’t know the details.
Musée Rodin, 2010-2013:
"The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."
"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."
“FOI is for administrative documents to increase transparency in government. Detailed 3D scans a museum does for research or preservation isn't an administrative document.
If you want a 3d scan of these statues, there's a lot of them around in scannable places like parks etc. If you just want to win, you're wasting everyone's time for no good reason.”
To put it differently, imagine the museum trained a RodinGPT on artworks and other data. The activist now bases his claim to the model on the fact that the model is a document.
The other commenter didn't answer any of the pertinent questions, namely, on which legal document they based their answer on what a "document" is and isn't. And one of the replies [1] points out to a possibly relevant EU directive against that point.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but saying "FOI is not meant for that" is the type of answer that requires some solid evidence that the other comment didn't provide.
Re: what "FOI is for": see my previous comment above excerpting from FREEDOM OF INFORMATION IN FRANCE, LAW AND PRACTICE
Re: a hypothetical LLM:
French FOI law covers all document formats. The CADA and courts have routinely recognized that documents produced by the government in formats such as audio recordings, x-rays, photographs (of submerged shipwrecks, no less), application source code, and computer algorithms may be considered administrative documents, communicable to the public.
So, if the French government produced an LLM and front end then, yes, that LLM model and its front end would be an administrative document, in principle communicable to the public. To me that does not seem improper or difficult or strange to imagine.
This discussion doesn’t make sense without looking at the actual French law. Just saying that the scans shouldn’t count as a document because it would lead to weird edge cases doesn’t mean the law shouldn’t be applied as written. You can’t just not apply active laws because you don’t like the outcome in a state where people are suppose to trust the law.
If you know french bureaucracy, it is very simple in the end.
It is a public worker that is nominated as the head of the museum. The mindset is almost never to do their job well or benefit the common good. But to be important and showing your importance by abusing your power if necessary to show that you have some.
Somehow he thinks that the sculpture is his own as he is the custodian, and so that he has all rights. And pictures or 3d scans in the end belongs to him also, like if the virtual thing was a physical item locked in the museum.
If he is forced to release publicly the 3d scan, especially against his goodwill, it is like being striped of his power and authority so he couldn't allow that. It becomes a personal matter.
The only thing that could have worked is to befriend him or create a cultural organisation and have lobbied to him in the first place that he would learned a lot of reputation/marketing points by releasing it. Imagine a dedicated website and grand champagne event with the incompetent minister of culture where they push the button...
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echoangle · · focus · HN ↗
Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…
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unyttigfjelltol · · focus · HN ↗
I read it like this: the museum wanted to safely preserve the original so they made a digital copy and hid it in a drawer. The author pointed out this was not lawful, and the museum panicked because they intended it as a digital copy protected similarly to the original. So, commendations to the appeals court for identifying the key philosophical issue; regrets that they ignored the actual law.
jacobolus · · focus · HN ↗
atombender · · focus · HN ↗
What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.
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shiandow · · focus · HN ↗
What's the law like on photographs? Those are effectively equivalent are they not? Or does the entire argument hinge on the fact that point clouds can be stored in a human readable format?
mceachen · · focus · HN ↗
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
You're badly confused. The scans are not a financial asset, and they don't even try to make money on them.
From Cosmo Wenman's earlier exploits:
> In August 2016, with the help of the Berlin-based attorney and law professor Kristoff Ritlewski, I sent the Egyptian Museum a request for the scan, citing German freedom of information laws
> The museum quickly referred the matter to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's state museums. The foundation—known in German as the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK)—is one of the largest cultural organizations in the world. When it received my records request, it acknowledged the existence of the Nefertiti scan and acknowledged that the organization was required by law to give me access to it. But it also declared that directly giving me copies of the scan data would threaten its commercial interests. The Egyptian Museum sells expensive Nefertiti replicas in its gift shop, and it implied that it needs to protect that revenue to finance its ongoing digitization efforts.
> In museum-world parlance, this argument against open access is known as "the gift shop defense."
> I asked them to reconsider their position, and to prioritize the benefits to the public of open access over gift shop revenue.
> I also made a new freedom of information request, this time for info about that revenue. I asked for records of their revenue from the sales of replicas of any artifacts, including the Bust of Nefertiti, that were derived from their scans. I asked for records of revenue from the licensing of any of their scan data to third parties. And I asked for any records that demonstrated how that revenue was directed to digitization projects. Finally, I asked them if they would accept a financial donation in exchange for making their Nefertiti data freely available to the public and, if so, what their price was.
> SPK's response, five months later, was revealing.
> SPK confirmed it had earned less than 5,000 euro, total, from marketing the Nefertiti scan, or any other scan for that matter. SPK also admitted it did not direct even that small revenue towards digitization, explaining that it was not obliged to do so.
( <a href="https://reason.com/2019/11/13/a-german-museum-tried-to-hide-this-stunning-3d-scan-of-an-iconic-egyptian-artifact-today-you-can-see-it-for-the-first-time/" rel="nofollow">https://reason.com/2019/11/13/a-german-museum-tried-to-hide-... )
atombender · · focus · HN ↗
justincormack · · focus · HN ↗
atombender · · focus · HN ↗
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thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
schiffern · · focus · HN ↗
Just "emboss" the text into 3D space, write that to a 3D file, and voila no more pesky fourth estate oversight! Watergate, eat your heart out...
withinboredom · · focus · HN ↗
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awongh · · focus · HN ↗
It comes off a little bit like they made a lazy decision at the outset, didn't want to reverse course to save face and knew they didn't need to back it up with anything....
NBJack · · focus · HN ↗
CosmoWenman · · focus · HN ↗
qingcharles · · focus · HN ↗
Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.
There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
It may have been a mistake to phrase the FOIA process to the affected bodies as "you must share" rather than "you now have the tools and process to share".
RobotToaster · · focus · HN ↗
someguydave · · focus · HN ↗
geokon · · focus · HN ↗
I remember in college my art history professor had a personal digital collection of high quality scans that he'd procure somehow that were impossible to find online. The data seems to be highly guarded, I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise
So my impression is that the Rodin Museum is not really the exception here
someguydave · · focus · HN ↗
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IshKebab · · focus · HN ↗
I doubt it. How much merchandise relies on high quality 3D scans?
I think the real reason is that a lot of people are naturally paranoid control freaks. Their instinct is that these scans should be secret and they never really think beyond that.
underlipton · · focus · HN ↗
Weird that anyone would care, since most of those works are presumably public domain. Is it not the legal right, in most of the Western world, of the public to reproduce such works, let alone to use them as elements in their own work?
echoangle · · focus · HN ↗
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echoangle · · focus · HN ↗
I don’t think every work done by a state controlled entity is automatically public domain, right?
CosmoWenman · · focus · HN ↗
See: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/arts/design/museums-mull-public-use-of-online-art-images.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/arts/design/museums-mull-...
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
A frequent topic of discussion is how hard it can be to get things on display. Many people in museum related roles view their job first as protecting and preserving the displays at all costs, with presenting them to the public as an unfortunate necessity that they’re forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who don’t want the best or most valuable works to be put on display or loan because that risks damaging them.
I would have thought that high resolution copies and archives of art would be a dream come true for these people, but from what I’ve observed many of them oppose that as well. They feel it provides an inauthentic or incomplete sense of their valued works, while also diminishing their profession of preserving these items. When you view yourself as the gatekeeper for a special, irreplaceable treasure, anything that produces a facsimile of that treasure is an abomination that must be resisted.
shermantanktop · · focus · HN ↗
Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.
MrBuddyCasino · · focus · HN ↗
Nietzsche said that the priests are the enemies, and I'm starting to think he was on to something.
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Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
It would be a warehouse without public access.
shermantanktop · · focus · HN ↗
jhbadger · · focus · HN ↗
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
The museum literally exists because they’re expected to display some things.
The preservationists who fight against showing anything wish the museum part didn’t exist. They want it all to be a big warehouse where nobody can see anything.
cgio · · focus · HN ↗
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
Their purpose is not to display the artwork and sharing the scans would take away from their purpose. If other people are already preserving the artwork, they have no need for you to do it too.
Jolter · · focus · HN ↗
bredren · · focus · HN ↗
Sibling comment gets at the detail better, but it seems museums have dual roles: display some works for the public and preserve a much greater archive of work for progeny (?).
The public interest in viewing stuff doesn’t sound like it gets nearly the cachet as being ones who get to actually be close to the works.
FWIW, this sounds somewhat similar to ROM or many other digital “rarity” communities online.
I remember this happening in the Dave Matthews Band online community in the aughts (oddly specific but yes people with recordings that led to say the full leak of what became Busted Stuff) or to be one of the few who had heard a copy of “Build you a house.”
More recently I saw evidence of hoarding / gatekeeping in leaks of clean (master?) individual tracks from studio recordings of major artists.
I seem to remember celerity photo leak scandals that began as some kind of insiders only type thing.
I mention these examples because the human condition to hoard or derive power over the control of content is not unique to museum administrators.
That said, physical copies of rare human art are undoubtedly worth protecting.
However, I find the protection of digital descriptions of the works, especially given comment that they are likely not even unique, galling and not dissimilar to all the gate keeping examples I provided above.
mrandish · · focus · HN ↗
Just guessing but museums are always fund-raising through grants and looking for ways to expand their mission and justify larger budgets. Digital preservation through new 3D scanning technology seems like ideal grant-fodder.
At the time, the thought they could be compelled through FOI to provide the scan data to the masses who pay their salaries probably never occured to them. Instead of seeing the scans as an opportunity to share the museum's collection more widely (supposedly a core part of their educational mission), they see them as a threat to their defacto monopoly.
joshspankit · · focus · HN ↗
CosmoWenman · · focus · HN ↗
"The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."
"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."
Moreover, the Ministry of Culture's call for projects expressly emphasized that one of the main objectives of this program was to promote "free and open consultation of digital cultural resources for all Internet users"
(These statements are from the museum's applications and the Ministry's call for digitization projects, which are linked in the body of my story.)
keiferski · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://youtu.be/OQiQk8AJ0YI?is=Wiwxeok0Hg4jMdJu" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/OQiQk8AJ0YI?is=Wiwxeok0Hg4jMdJu
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a few artists whose works are somewhat belittled by being digitized and viewed on a screen: Monet and Rothko. Both have monumental size paintings that really don’t work if you aren’t there in person. But since the only way most people interact with them is via a screen, they are often criticized (Rothko specifically.)
So in other words, some art necessarily has a physical dimension which cannot be appreciated in a non-physical way.
uncomputation · · focus · HN ↗
keiferski · · focus · HN ↗
Lynch also wasn’t talking about only his movies, he was talking about cinema as a whole.
underlipton · · focus · HN ↗
I mean, the museum setting is an arbitrary middle ground between the initial intended presentation (a 19th century salon or 20th century gallery showing, in specific physical spaces, likely to be attended by specific people) and wherever and at whatever fidelity that initial presentation is reproduced. What's impure enough to be verboten? No thumbnails in museum brochures or online? Do we restrict entrance to the demographic that was initially present? Are we allowed to light them with modern fixtures? Must the air in the gallery be a reproduction of Paris or New York's historical smog?
An artist's intent should be respected, sure, but I do wonder how much of it is that, and how much of it is a sort of elitism and gatekeeping from people who are not the artist.
keiferski · · focus · HN ↗
The rest of what you wrote is unnecessarily pedantic.
underlipton · · focus · HN ↗
CosmoWenman · · focus · HN ↗
joshspankit · · focus · HN ↗
conartist6 · · focus · HN ↗
It doesn't seem outrageous to me though that there exists a category of documents more detailed and sensitive than "administrative" documents.
egocodedinsol · · focus · HN ↗
Of course, reproductions are how basically how all of his statues we see today were made anyway, using and scaling up the clay sculptures. The musee rodin still makes authorized “original” reproductions, up to 12 can be called original. These are authorized by the musee rodin, and account for 30-45 percent of their annual budget.
So a perfect point cloud could be used to make your own molds, and from their your own bronze statues. I wouldn’t call it “counterfeit” because that’s basically how they were done even back in the day, and why there are many “authentic/original/authorised” Thinkers/etc across the world.
Probably at some point walking around with an iPhone will be good enough to make a near indistinguishable point cloud, so the result of this legal process could be kinda moot unless they stop folks from using iPhones near the statues all over the world.
<a href="https://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/museum/institution/self-funding-museum" rel="nofollow">https://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/museum/institution/self-fundin...
bird0861 · · focus · HN ↗
sinuhe69 · · focus · HN ↗
Museums want to prevent that and also ensure their own existence.
PS: in this specific case, the museum has to worry about counterfeit copies of Rodin works as well. But I don’t want to succulents on that as I don’t know the details.
CosmoWenman · · focus · HN ↗
"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."
p1anecrazy · · focus · HN ↗
“FOI is for administrative documents to increase transparency in government. Detailed 3D scans a museum does for research or preservation isn't an administrative document.
If you want a 3d scan of these statues, there's a lot of them around in scannable places like parks etc. If you just want to win, you're wasting everyone's time for no good reason.”
To put it differently, imagine the museum trained a RodinGPT on artworks and other data. The activist now bases his claim to the model on the fact that the model is a document.
probably_wrong · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not saying you're wrong, but saying "FOI is not meant for that" is the type of answer that requires some solid evidence that the other comment didn't provide.
[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49951807">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49951807
CosmoWenman · · focus · HN ↗
Re: a hypothetical LLM: French FOI law covers all document formats. The CADA and courts have routinely recognized that documents produced by the government in formats such as audio recordings, x-rays, photographs (of submerged shipwrecks, no less), application source code, and computer algorithms may be considered administrative documents, communicable to the public.
So, if the French government produced an LLM and front end then, yes, that LLM model and its front end would be an administrative document, in principle communicable to the public. To me that does not seem improper or difficult or strange to imagine.
echoangle · · focus · HN ↗
greatgib · · focus · HN ↗
Somehow he thinks that the sculpture is his own as he is the custodian, and so that he has all rights. And pictures or 3d scans in the end belongs to him also, like if the virtual thing was a physical item locked in the museum.
If he is forced to release publicly the 3d scan, especially against his goodwill, it is like being striped of his power and authority so he couldn't allow that. It becomes a personal matter.
The only thing that could have worked is to befriend him or create a cultural organisation and have lobbied to him in the first place that he would learned a lot of reputation/marketing points by releasing it. Imagine a dedicated website and grand champagne event with the incompetent minister of culture where they push the button...
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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