Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

simonw

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?

pj_mukh

Oh boy. I don’t want to freak the museum out but I have 360 degree footage of large sections of the museum (mostly for a spatial index) and now I’m wondering how high a quality I could get with splatting the sculptures and making it public. Would I get cease desisted for hosting from across the pond? Or would they be too lazy to come after me?

DoctorOetker

People always get upset when I propose mathematical formalization of law and using e.g. metamath verifier as a judge. At least the metamath verifiers will not bend over backwards and come up with absurd inconsistent counterarguments. It's the most humiliating thing for citizens when the legal cadre of a nation pretends in the national journal that everybody falls for its lies... openly mocking the concept of truth itself with absurdism.

worik

On the face of it this is establishment forces looking after each other to hold back data they fear could have value when it should be in the (French) public domain But, we are hearing from one side, one perspective. The museum has not had a fair expression of their side here. Court proceedings can look unfairly bizarre when unfairly reported. I am not saying this report is definitely unfair, but it is impossible to tell

arjie

A very good warning to most museums that rely on reproductions and so on to not make high-quality scans of their artifacts. Once you do so, you lose a revenue stream in reproductions because anyone then will have high-quality data to produce reconstructions. If anyone has already done this, they are probably best served to immediately destroy those on some kind of archival cost pretext, retaining only the original artifacts. The steady state of this might be that most artifacts are at risk of being lost, certainly, but this particular combination of rules certainly makes it hard for a public museum to survive. Private collections face no such risk, of course.

amanaplanacanal

Do they actually have any sculptures that don't already have copies spread around the world in other museums? They are fighting a losing battle here.

nik282000

Steal, lie, cheat, do what you want as long as you do not take from other _people_. A government is not a person, a business is not a person, a museum is not a person. They should not have the power to deprive you from accessing any media which they "own" but did not create.

froh

will this be appealed at the EU level?

yubblegum

> Alexis Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh Completely an aside, but I find that a most unusual name for a Frenchman. AI informs me that Fitzjean is Norman and that last name is obviously Irish.

akanet

I'll fucking scan them then. Are they just out on the floor? They can't stop me.

Animats

The Rodin Museum's bronzes are not even "the originals", which makes this whole thing amusing. The originals created by Rodin were clay models, from which plaster molds were made. Those were used to cast bronzes. Not just one bronze copy, many copies. There are at least 23 copies of "The Thinker" cast during Rodin's lifetime, and even more later copies.[1] In the SF Bay Area, the Palace of the Legion of Honor has one. One of the point clouds shown is of Rodin's "Gates of Hell", and a copy of that can be seen outside the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, which has a small garden of Rodin bronzes. So if you really need a 3D scan, there are lots of bronzes available to scan. What scares the Rodin Museum is that they are still selling reproductions.[2] Resin copies are available through the gift shop, and bronze copies can be ordered. They have a complicated argument about "moral rights" to justify their monopoly which is marginal at this late date. (Rodin died in 1917.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Thinker_sculptures [2] https://boutique.musee-rodin.fr/en/10-sculpture-reproduction...

crystaln

I guess I never want to do business in France. What an abominable court system.