Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court
cosmowenman.substack.com
cosmowenman.substack.com
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
P.S.: Something to cheer you up : https://youtu.be/sQ9I4t0kJxg
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"?!
Which is a pretty sweet comeuppance for not handing over these specific scans when asked.
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.
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.
https://reason.com/2019/11/13/a-german-museum-tried-to-hide-...
Gervais Principle
Reference: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
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.
Anything else is corruption.
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).
I would say the most democratic way we have found is voting. The free market is efficient, but not concerned with democracy.
Obviously not compared to profitable businesses, but instead to our appetite to support them and use them.
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.
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.
Hard to say how that would look or happen in practice but it's interesting to think about.
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.
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-origin...
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 ?
Government(s) levy royalties on IP it protects.
I'd feel a lot less grumpy about ever expanding scopes for patents and copyrights if we got something (directly) in return.
Yes, corporations big and small are pretty good at reporting close to zero profit to avoid most of the taxes.
But that has still led us exactly where we are at.
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.
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.
If anything it would reduce overcrowding .
It’s not like the average tourist has unrestricted opportunities to visit any day of the year, usually it’s only a narrow number of dates.
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.
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).
I don’t want to vacation to any tourist attraction anytime soon, let alone the places that are currently overcrowded.
And if this is your own subconscious desire, it’s a bit bizarre to insert it this deep into a comment chain…
Someone mentioned prices should be increased to reduce demand, and here we are.
But either way, you responded to them first: https://imgur.com/a/Q7nFW8t
Be better at this next time.
Edit: If you have confused thoughts I don’t appreciate being dragged into it. Take it somewhere else.
Have a great great day.
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.
Edit: If ‘Tostino’ wants to intentionally troll, that’s sad, but that doesn’t imply another user has to do this or that…
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.
I feel flattered that a few sentences can flip expressed intentions of leaving, to staying until getting banned for trolling.
If your also being amused then sure I’ll help? IDK what else to say.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
A scan is effectively a digital mold, it’s the same conversation
A scan is effectively a digital mold, it’s the same conversation
Scans of paintings are usually considered public domain, why wouldn’t 3D scans of sculptures be different?
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.
I have no clue if museums are in that space at all though
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.
Public access appears to have been an explicit condition of the government grant they applied to for the money to make the scans.
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.
As an example, take a look at the wireframe of the Rosetta Stone (https://i.imgur.com/rtpiwjZ.png | https://github.com/BritishMuseumDH/rosettaStone/blob/master/...) and you'll see what I mean. For a high quality rock-like object, you'd probably aim for 2000-5000 triangles, while the Rosetta Stone scan seems to have 480,000 triangles straight from the scanning software.
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.
would this remain true for modern higher end graphics cards?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 :)
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?
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.
Edit: best source I can find on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPy74M9FNpY&t=690s
and here's one from the Louvre: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/8b6f54/nice_de...
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.
https://animalcrossing.fandom.com/wiki/Informative_statue?fi...
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?
Something to think about.
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.
Little people fighting for their big egos are far from uncommon in those institutions.
> Is there no equivalent to "contempt of court" in french law? Is this typical?
The French legal system has been under extreme duress over the last decade or so.
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/04/02/justice-la-c...
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.)
Trying to pull up the ladder is something people only do once they're on top.
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.
"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.
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.
What painting has the largest area of appreciation, when notoriety or quality is multiplied by time allowed to view it?
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.
Then we went and spent a few hours enjoying the rest of the museum, where there is plenty of art I appreciated more.
And to make things even weirder, China has gone on a little-noticed crusade to steal back artifacts of Chinese origin.
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].
[1]: https://ial.uk.com/the-perpetual-copyright-protection-of-ita...
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.
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.
- 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.
Le Conseil d'Etat est la juridiction administrative suprême.
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).
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.
"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.
Interestingly enough the last three presidents renounced their seats (I don't know why)
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.
Excuse my humor. I'm a huge francophile actually.
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.
Etc.
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.
I believe the term for that is “nanny state”.
“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.”
So how are museums in Singapore treating 3D scans?
And since when are the French blindly obedient? Is that really their reputation?
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 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.
[0] https://www.pappers.fr/entreprise/musee-national-auguste-rod...
[1] https://cosmowenman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/20190426-...
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.
We have a word for this concept: Staatsräson.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's weird because the Conseil d'Etat thinks it is the "supreme administrative judge" [0]. How could they not know that they are not a court?
[0] https://www.conseil-etat.fr/decisions-de-justice/juger-les-l...
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.
[1] https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/decision/1980/80119DC...
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.
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.
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.
License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlikeCCThere 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?
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.
It seems too comically slow and inconvenient.
Even with the current protocol people find ways to block "progress". For example, the Oosterweel Link [0], which has been postponed multiple times.
“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.” '
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/july/high-resolutio...
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.
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.
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.
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 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 :) )
I'm not sure what exactly you're misunderstanding but this is not how the law works.
Displaying attribution for free worldwide geodata sounds quite good for me.
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.
https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_Compatibility
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
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) ?
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.
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
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...
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.
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.
you're really not joking
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].
[0] https://www.lehm-laden.de/en_GB/shop/pneumatit-pneumatit-50-...
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.
https://www.lehm-laden.de/en_GB/pneumatit
They even state that it doesn't have an effect on the physical properties of the material.
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?
> 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.
https://www.senat.fr/rap/r20-487/r20-4874.html#toc29
> "LE RÔLE CROISSANT DE LA GÉOBIOLOGIE EN RÉPONSE AUX ANGLES MORTS DE LA SCIENCE"
Translates to "the growing role of geobiology in response to science's blind spots".
Then for Pneumatit it's not in Senat files, I might have to rewatch the video and add to that later.
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.
Minor typo: if the author or anyone who knows him is reading this, the word wanted there probably is elicit.
[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.]
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.
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.
Bravo.
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.
A short jail term for the person who heads the museum might motivate them to act better
Will be programming an email for next week :)
Contacts
Cosmo Wenman cosmowenman.com cosmo.wenman@gmail.com
Alexis Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh Attorney at the Paris Bar afocavocat.eu afoc@afocavocat.eu afoc.avocat@protonmail.com
Hugues Herpin Head of Service, Musée Rodin herpin@musee-rodin.fr +33 (0)1 44 18 61 10
Hélène Pilidjian Head of the litigation office, Ministry of Culture helene.pilidjian@culture.gouv.fr +33 (0)1 40 15 80 00
Caroline-Sarah Ellenberg Deputy Director, in charge of legal affairs, Réunion des musées nationaux caroline-sarah.ellenberg@rmngp.fr +33 (0)1 40 13 48 00
Pierre Vigneron Head of Grand Palais Rmn Photo Pierre.Vigneron@rmngp.fr agence.photo@grandpalaisrmn.fr +33 (0)1 40 13 48 00
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.
Merci de le partager avec toute personne susceptible d'être intéressée par les Open Data.
https://apnews.com/article/woman-declared-dead-2017-is-alive...
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?
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?
privatize: "transfer (a business, industry, or service) from public to private ownership and control."
The outcome here does not include privatizing the scans by the author! I'm not sure we read the same article
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.
There could be an argument that this liberalization means these projects need larger funding, but the museum took a different road.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Related :
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1341280/NotreDame_de_Pari...
If paid with taxpayer money, then yes, if not, then no.
Should be open/shut. But taxes suck and lawmakers views of where money comes from is pretty jacked up these days.
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.
(Same person, same topic, different materials; this is the article about the bust of Nefertiti linked in the piece.)
Wow. If this went down as depicted, I'd be pretty disgusted with the museum if I was a citizen there.
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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?
Sounds like a pretty good reason
They're ignoring the French freedom-of-information law; copyright law doesn't even touch the issue.
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's a pretty bad argument even besides the lack of legal relevance.
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.
So It's just another nonsense argument
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.