26 ms·

Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

776 points by abetusk 2y ago

thaumasiotes 2y ago
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558805 (Same person, same topic, different materials; this is the article about the bust of Nefertiti linked in the piece.)
- lovegrenoble 2y ago
  also very interesting
lovegrenoble 2y ago
Bon courage. I hope you get these hypocrites through. Do you have a foundation to raise money for lawyers?
kranke155 2y ago
"In response to the museum’s nonsensical technological claims, we submitted expert testimony from Professor Michael Kazhdan, full professor of computer graphics in the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and co-developer of the Poisson Surface Reconstruction algorithm, which is used worldwide in 3D scan data analysis. Professor Kazhdan explained to the court that documents in plaintext format are fundamentally well suited for preserving scan data, and that such documents are easily exploitable by experts and amateurs alike." Yes. Yes. That must've felt satisfying. "In response to Musee Rodin's nonsense, we present here the inventor of the basic techniques of 3D scanning, Dr. Kazhdan, from John Hopkins..."
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Ringz 2y ago
  Reminds me of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall scene „If Life Were Only Like This“: https://youtu.be/vTSmbMm7MDg https://youtu.be/vTSmbMm7MDg
  - kranke155 2y ago
    It's pretty much that!
- zelos 2y ago
  "Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here...
praptak 2y ago
I am okay with public information being free to use commercially, with a huge disclaimer though. Wherever copyright is applicable, the public should retain it, that's what public domain is for. Any derived works, commercial or otherwise should also be in the public domain. If you fight for "public access" so that you can make your own stuff locked behind a copyright, then you are the hypocrite here.
- geokon 2y ago
  an interesting example where this has been problematic is OpenStreetMap. They can't ingest a lot of government data b/c their project requires a relicense with their attribution-requirement (where all users are forced to have an ugly OSM bumper sticker on their maps)
  - pastage 2y ago
    FWIW attribution does not have to be big nor on the map, it is just less work to use the default than putting it elsewhere.
  - stereo 2y ago
    What you call an ugly bumper sticker is credit where it is due, but also an important recruitment mechanism for new mappers, which improves the map. The /copyright page is our biggest landing page on the website, even above the base / page. Attribution is also a requirement of many proprietary map providers.
    - geokon 2y ago
      yes, I've misclicked the hidden link many times as well The credit is due to the volunteers or governments that created the data, and not the project that collates it (their names are not displayed). The logic behind wikipedia doesn't translate to OSM b/c OSM is providing data to be reused If this requirement wasn't there in the first place then OSM maps would have been the default go-to map and a household name like wikipedia. You wouldn't need to force an ad in every map to self-promote. > Attribution is also a requirement of many proprietary map providers the project had the opportunity to do something truly different and unique and chose not to... what a missed opportunity.
Jyaif 2y ago
> in private, RMN admits it won’t release its scans because it wants to protect its gift shops’ sales revenue from competition from the public making their own replicas. Sounds like a pretty good reason
- frereubu 2y ago
  Understandable perhaps, "good" enough to completely ignore copyright law, no.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    What copyright law? If I possess an out-of-copyright document, nothing requires me to make a copy for you when you ask me. They're ignoring the French freedom-of-information law; copyright law doesn't even touch the issue.
    - frereubu 2y ago
      My point, perhaps badly made, was that copyright law has expired, therefore it should be in the public domain.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Being in the public domain doesn't mean someone has to give you a copy.
        kelseyfrog 2y ago
        No, that's why the author is using freedom of information laws to accomplish his goals. If you are a government institution - and these museums are - in a country with freedom of information laws, then it follows that you can be compelled to comply with them by the courts.
- tupshin 2y ago
  The article is long, but from TFA 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...
mmooss 2y ago
Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. The public can freely access hundreds of scans of classical sculpture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and visitors to the Smithsonian’s website can view, navigate, and freely download thousands of high-quality scans of artifacts ranging from dinosaur fossils to the Apollo 11 space capsule. Has anyone used these in games? They would be great easter eggs and they have artistry and design that is far beyond almost anything DIY.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Potentially cooler than The Teapot, though there are also other considerations I guess...
- diggan 2y ago
  > Has anyone used these in games? 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://i.imgur.com/rtpiwjZ.png | https://github.com/BritishMuseumDH/rosettaStone/blob/master/models/stone.stl 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.
  - 2y ago
glimshe 2y ago
What I feel about this is similar to what I feel about government-sponsored research institutes and universities not releasing their research to the public... If you get money from the government, society is paying for your work so it's entitled to it. Oh, you want to keep the data for yourself? DON'T ask or accept money from us the people.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
jimmySixDOF 2y ago
There was an interesting project from the Natural History Museum using a syncatron particle accelerator to 3d scan some part their the famous 300 year old insect collection and make it openly available but that announcement was 2021 and I can't seem to find the results let alone see if they were released to the public. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/july/high-resolution-3d-scanning-understand-insect-evolution.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/july/high-resolutio...
- foobar1962 2y ago
  Maybe the delay has been caused by bugs.
Symbiote 2y ago
> The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.) I was initially sympathetic to the museum, as it's common for public funding to be tight, and revenue from the gift shop or commercial licencing of their objects can fill the gap. I don't know about France, but I expect the ministry has been heavily pushing public museums to increase their income in this way. However, that doesn't justify the deception described by the article.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  In the previous story over the Nefertiti bust, the German museum tried to use this gift shop defense, but then when pressed, you could see that they made almost no money from it.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  This the law of unintended consequences in action. I suspect that neither the government nor museums thought there was any legal obligations to make 3D scans public and I'd wager that the legislator did not have that in mind when they drafted the freedom of information laws. But then, suddenly (as per linked article): "The Commission on Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) ... had never before considered any dispute about 3D scans. It affirmed my request that musée Rodin communicate copies of its scans to me, determining for the first time that public agencies’ 3D scans are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public." A decision which has been going up the chain of courts since and is apparently close to the possibly dramatic climax. Indeed, the commercial argument is therefore irrelevant to this and the museum was clutching at straws there, really...
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Good laws try to be future-proof. Transparency of government is a big deal in liberal democracies. It's incongruous for a museum to resist something like this, when exhibiting artifacts to the public is one of the main reasons for their very existence.
niemandhier 2y ago
Data *should* be free, but in an age where predatory corps crawl the web to train models they hide behind paywalls, having control over your data means being able to explicitly give them to those that serve the common good. I used to be sympathetic to causes such as this, but in the advent of the plunder of our digital cultural heritage I have become skeptical. Why should proprietary AI get data payed for by the french tax payer?
- adrianN 2y ago
  States do a lot of things with taxes that benefit commercial interests. Why should this data be an exception?
- kranke155 2y ago
  That's the thing, this data is in public domain, since Rodin died a long long time ago.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
  Just regulate AI, don’t mess with freedom because some abuse it.
Abhitaneja89 2y ago
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Abhitaneja89 2y ago
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myrmidon 2y ago
This is utterly puzzling to me. 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.
- gyomu 2y ago
  > pure stubbornness or some weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side 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-colere-qui-monte-portrait-d-un-systeme-en-crise_6225525_3232.html https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/04/02/justice-la-c...
- newaccount74 2y ago
  > weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side That's exactly it. I work on a website that makes ancient artefacts accessible. A lot of them are in museums. You wouldn't believe how many museums: - don't want to show you their archive - don't want to let you take pictures - want you to share only low res pictures - want you to get permission before you can "publish" their artefacts, etc. It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them. It's ridiculous. Fortunately, the people working on the website are relentless, and manage to eventually get collection after collection photographed and added mostly by being patient. For some collections it took 20 years before they got access -- but since everyone uses their website, and everyone apart from the local museum director wants the stuff to be in there, eventually they get access to most things. (Museums in Italy are the worst, allegedly. They really think they own antiquity.)
iterance 2y ago
I suspect the true rationale may be more deeply based on art history than either the museum or this article are letting on. To understand why, I think it's important to reckon with what happened to "art" as an institution when the processes of reproduction became cheap and readily available during the 1900s. I can only sketch and I won't fully do it justice. Before the 1900s, some methods of mechanical reproduction did exist. These methods could be used to mechanically reproduce the written word and very specific forms of visual media. But one factor governed the creation of reproducible works: the work had to be made in a format that permitted reproduction. Put another way, the author of a work must have designed their work for reproduction, implicitly or explicitly consenting to it. For example, a Japanese wood block carver chooses to make a wood block rather than draw directly on the page; this deliberate choice creates the means of mechanical reproduction. Even when this is done, the choice to do so often comes at prohibitive cost, and while the cost of reproduction is reduced, it remains nontrivial. But for the rest of art and artists, exclusivity was not just implied, it was an expected standard. There is only one Mona Lisa. It was made in so-and-so year by so-and-so. Around this grew a nearly occult tradition of reverence for the individual, as expressed through their work - their true work, the one in front of you, unique and inviolable. Through the 1900s artists were reckoning with the creation of film, and later, digital media. I won't rehash all these arguments. Suffice it to say that one main challenge was to the ethos of art itself. If the work is infinitely reproducible, then where has the artist gone? Today, anyone who wants to see the Mona Lisa has already done so. The original is a mere novelty, except to certain very rare specialists. This has only grown more true with digital media, as the ease of reproduction and fidelity have both increased dramatically. Among a certain type of art culture enthusiast, or maybe dogmatist, there remains a belief that art has lost something material as a result of its reproducibility. And it is undeniably a reasonable belief that if people are provided the requisite data, they will, eventually, reproduce the artwork to a satisfactory degree. To many of these people, call them any jeers you want, sculpture remains one of the last bastions where the occult value surrounding the artist, who made the work, has not been diminished, because no one has yet figured out how to mechanically reproduce a sculpture to a high degree of fidelity. Certain museums hold this as a guiding principle, because it is their interpretation of what "art" is supposed to culturally mean. A 3D scan of a sculpture destroys that final bastion of sanctity against the oncoming tide of reproducible devaluation. Now, I don't believe this argument is a good one. Frankly I think it's a bit Pollyanna, but I have to acknowledge I set it up so I could be strawmanning it a bit. But the reason we're not likely to hear it here is because, despite (what I suspect to be) its central importance to the Rodin, it is not, at its core, a legitimate legal argument.
sharpshadow 2y ago
Great read and an important battle for an open society. It strongly reminds me of universities and their model to sell papers to the public after the public already paid for their creation. Hopefully this ruling will somehow help in that regard to open up publicly funded work.
toolslive 2y ago
> ... are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public. They can still utterly frustrate you in the way they do this. They could fe print them out layer by layer and only show these in a specific "viewing room". I have seen my government (Belgium) use this strategy when it comes to architectural plans. In essence, it's public (you can access them) but it's also rather useless.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Do they offer an explanation as to why it’s set up that way? It seems too comically slow and inconvenient.
  - toolslive 2y ago
    I guess they want to limit your time with them. If you could study them whenever you want with whatever tools you have, you can easily find conflicts between the plans and the building regulations. This would allow you to block the planned construction works. Even with the current protocol people find ways to block "progress". For example, the Oosterweel Link [0], which has been postponed multiple times. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Are exceptions to buildings regulations not typically documented somewhere in Belgium?
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  '“But the plans were on display…” “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.” '
rendall 2y ago
> ...I approached musée Rodin with a strategy to illicit a full airing... Minor typo: if the author or anyone who knows him is reading this, the word wanted there probably is elicit.
- dTal 2y ago
  That jumped out to me as well, particularly given the otherwise high quality of the writing. It's an example of what I perceive as a more general phenomenon - spelling errors, particularly confusion of uncommon homonyms[note], appear to have increased in frequency. I previously attributed it to the internet simply lowering the bar for "publishing" to the less educated, and the greater proportion of text that makes it to our eyeballs without the intercession of an editor - but seeing such a glaring mistake in a text clearly written by someone with otherwise very good command of the language makes me wonder if there are other factors, perhaps the rise of verbal media such as audiobooks, podcasts, and YouTube channels. [note: I see "fazed" spelled as "phased" more often than I see it spelled correctly now. I suspect its proper spelling will eventually die out.]
  - hotspot_one 2y ago
    or speech-to-text systems. The person might not be typing the text.
  - rendall 2y ago
    It has taken me a long time to let go of "to beg the question" as exclusively meaning "to employ circular reasoning" and not cringe when I see it used to mean "to raise the question". What gave me calm to accept such changes is understanding that the language we use today is a result of such changes. Awful once meant full of awe and now means very bad or unpleasant. Nice no longer means foolish and now means pleasant. Girl referred to a young person of either gender and now specifically means a female child. Silly once meant happy or fortunate and now means foolish or absurd. Meat once referred to food of all kinds, not just animal flesh. I imagine there were people who experienced these changes with some despair. But everything's okay. English is still expressive and meaningful. The sky has not fallen. The center holds.
JofArnold 2y ago
I love this and applaud it. 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.
- AyyEye 2y ago
  Photogrammetry is well established and you can do that with any camera and a few hours of cpu time.
  - mapt 2y ago
    Photogrammetry is great with textured, consistently lit, opaque objects. Blank white plaster, less so. You really want some kind of microtexture to grab on to for it to be anywhere close to a structured light scanner. That may mean you want a macro lens and a thousand exposures because you're grabbing on to microscopic surface roughness or dust. Not necessarily easy to do surreptitiously.
    - AyyEye 2y ago
      Yes they are different things and photogrammetry isn't a replacement for a "real" 3d scanner. But this is about museums which largely aren't unlit plain white surfaces. Getting models of museum objects is generally doable by anyone without thousands in specialised equipment. Taking a video or pictures is a lot less weird than pulling out any scanner.
      - dr_kiszonka 2y ago
        Do you have any software recommendations? I tried a few photogrammetry apps to capture small items (e.g., keycaps) and bigger ones (e.g., my face) but the results were never good enough. Ideally, I would like to open such models in Fusion, make a few edits, and 3D print them.
gwbas1c 2y ago
I've been to an art museum with a large collection of ancient Greek and Egyptian statues. A lot of the statues are damaged, or were painted and the paint has long since worn off. I'd love to walk through a VR recreation of what they believe the statues looked like when they were new. It balances the need for preservation of what remains, and the need to preserve the subjective interpretation of what the art was meant to be.
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
I love the idea of preserving history through 3D scans. When I learned about Gobekli Tepe a few years ago it caught my heart, and since then I've been wishing that someone would produce a detailed 3D scan of the site. Does anyone know if there's any company, group, or non-profits trying to make this happen for key historical landmarks? Most people are unlikely to be able to visit such locations, and they probably can't handle that many visitors, so making a digital version seems like a great compromise.
- chime 2y ago
  Not a non-profit but Ubisoft has been doing significant 3D scanning and sharing (unsure under what license) for their Assassins Creed franchise: https://mocapsolutions.com/blogs/news/assassin-s-creed-unity-redeems-itself-with-3d-digital-scans-of-notre-dame-de-paris https://mocapsolutions.com/blogs/news/assassin-s-creed-unity... 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.
rpigab 2y ago
I am a French taxpayer. 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.
- RansomStark 2y ago
  > It's homeopathy for concrete 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-ml-18067#attr= https://www.lehm-laden.de/en_GB/shop/pneumatit-pneumatit-50-...
  - rpigab 2y ago
    Oh how I wish I was joking. 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.
  - jjcm 2y ago
    There's even more: > 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 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.
t43562 2y ago
There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it. When I see some of the virtual reconstructions of Ancient Rome or Pompeii, I wonder if the real thing will be of less interest than the reconstituted, repaired one. I think this is normal - there are now billions of people in the world and only so much "great art". I was in a huge crowd looking at the Mona Lisa. There was nothing magical about the experience. I'd rather have my own copy or put my VR glasses on and enjoy it in, say, the house where it was first displayed. I can see museums fearing the loss of visitors or at least fearing that someone else will make billions out of virtualising it and they won't. I mean, search engines make billions out of the knowledge other people built over centuries. AI takes open source information and code and makes billions selling the embodied knowledge that was given away for free. It's not as if corporations aren't happy to rape the commons and call themselves heroes for doing it. This isn't a good reason for the museum's attitude but I don't look to the future free exploitation of public information with unalloyed optimism.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  > There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it. For certain things, I could see that. But for many things I go see, it's being there that is part of the point. Knowing that I'm seeing or touching the actual thing the artist saw and touched, or standing in a place where the builders worked build it, etc. Seeing a perfect representation misses that.
  - SapporoChris 2y ago
    It probably depends a lot on personality. For myself, I obsessively studied space exploration history as a child. When I was much older, I toured National Air and Space Museum in District of Columbia and found it terribly boring, no new knowledge, nothing I hadn't read about before.
    - rootusrootus 2y ago
      I can see your point of view. It definitely is going to depend on what you are going for. I've never gone to a museum for knowledge. I enjoyed the Smithsonian (though, aside from a few specific artifacts, I really prefer Udvar-Hazy to the museum on the mall) solely because of the feeling I got being in the presence of the actual machines that I've learned so much about. Reading about Glamorous Glennis or the Enola Gay is one thing, but to stand in front of it and think "that right there is the actual plane Chuck Yeager flew past mach 1" is 100% of why I go to the museum.
dagenleg 2y ago
Why exactly is non-commercial open access problematic? I think the author is going overboard by framing this as some kind of righteous crusade for the public access. After all, he is interested in making profit from this. Sure, public funding paid for it, so then why should the profits be privatized?
- kardos 2y ago
  There is no privatization here (moving the scans from public domain to private), the author is seeking the opposite, shifting the scans to the public unencumbered.
  - dagenleg 2y ago
    Yes, to be commercialized and privatized by the author. Somehow all of the "open access projects" on the authors website seem to be concerned with releasing 3D models scanned by others, and not you know, his own projects. I don't see any commitments to publish derived work and such. I know that the story of an independent artist fighting a big bureaucratic public institutions is something that would get a lot of sympathy here, but this really isn't that much of a "David and Goliath" kind of tale. French heritage and research entities are underfunded and understaffed, they don't have competent lawyers, or indeed funding to afford those, as we can clearly see from this case. One litigation-happy American can run circles around them and profit from it too. If as soon as the heritage work gets 3D scanned with French public funds, it will immediately get scooped and monetized by private sector, wouldn't the ultimate outcome be that less objects get scanned? Why would the museums even bother fighting for the digitization grant funds?
    - kardos 2y ago
      > Yes, to be commercialized and privatized by the author. 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
      - 2y ago
djoldman 2y ago
> The court noted that musée Rodin had obviously created its 3D scans in the context of its public service mission .... the judges specifically reasoned against musée Rodin’s trade secrecy claim by citing its 3D digitization funding applications to the Ministry of Culture, in which the museum stipulated its commitment to publishing its scans. The museum had attempted to hide these funding applications from us and the court, telling the court they did not exist. However, in the course of the trial we obtained those applications by forcing a parallel documents request directly to the Ministry of Culture — which the museum complained to the court was a "crude maneuver" — exposing the museum’s deception and badly wounding the defense on this critical issue. Wow. If this went down as depicted, I'd be pretty disgusted with the museum if I was a citizen there.
lucasverra 2y ago
at the end of the article there is emails addresses of the actors in this. 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
dmitrygr 2y ago
Given that the museum has ignored all court orders and deadlines and faced no repercussions, what exactly do they expect will happen when the Supreme Court too rules against the museum? Until these court rulings have teeth, it just makes a fun article to read. A short jail term for the person who heads the museum might motivate them to act better
t_luke 2y ago
The British art journal has run a long campaign to establish that (a) museum photographs of out of copyright works cannot be copyrighted and (b) the schemes to sell such reproductions don’t even break even financially
bell-cot 2y ago
Ah, France. Where the gov't can decide that you are dead, and mere reality is not a valid counter-argument: https://apnews.com/article/woman-declared-dead-2017-is-alive-2256556e1c682d8ca561cc14b58b0228 https://apnews.com/article/woman-declared-dead-2017-is-alive...
rendall 2y ago
This is an astonishing account. I should no longer be amazed when governmental, or quasi-governmental, bodies abuse their authority in defiance of the law or reason, but it's absolutely baffling. Peripheral, but related: one of my favorite genre of YouTube video is that of people who quietly assert their civil rights to, e.g., stand in front of City Hall with a cardboard sign, or record video inside City Hall or a public library or other public building, or record anything at all on video from a public sidewalk, or criticize the mayor at a town meeting, all completely legal and protected activity in the USA. Astonishing, the number of times a civil servant or police officer will attempt to run these people off under threat of arrest, exposing themselves and their town to a federal lawsuit. Invariably, without an ounce of self reflection, they frame these people as troublemakers, as no doubt does the Rodin Museum to Cosmo Wenman, even as the courts thump them.
krick 2y ago
This is kinda amazing that one has fight for it. I would like to think any museum should be immensely grateful to anyone willing to put in his time to either do the scanning himself or at least to provide an open platform to distribute the scans. Honestly, I am less sympathetic about this particular case (I mean, who cares about accurate representations of Rodin's sculptures anyway?), but making an open catalog of all digital copies of all ancient stuff found this far really should be #1 priority for history as a research discipline at this point, IMO. It is absurd that anyone would actively prevent that. Yet, at some sites you aren't even allowed to take a photo (yes, w/o a flash), even if it is accessible. Most important sites and archives, obviously, aren't accessible to normal people at all.
justinclift 2y ago
> Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. Attempting that just now from the linked page: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-rosetta-stone-1e03509704a3490e99a173e53b93e282 https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-rosetta-stone-1e03509704... Note that Sketchfab is a 3rd party crowd (not the British Museum), and trying to download that model requires signing up for a Sketchfab account. So while it's kind of "public access", that's only while Sketchfab is still around and still requires giving this random place your details. It's better than nothing, but not exactly fantastic for a public institution to be doing.
- sadeshmukh 2y ago
  At least you can download it. They can't undownload it once you have it, and people can distribute from what they have.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Yeah, thus my "better than nothing" wording. :) Interestingly, also from the article: I’m much less interested in half measures, whereby the public might be granted access to scans only for, say, educational purposes, but be improperly prohibited from using them commercially. Those kinds of compromises undermine the public’s right to reuse public domain works and can lead to people hesitating to use them in any way because they are unsure of their rights and fear unknown punishments. Whereas the licence on that Rosetta Stone scan by the British Museum is indeed "non commercial" only: License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlikeCC
  - autoexec 2y ago
    It'd be nice if they got uploaded to archive.org or somewhere else where the public can get it without handing over a bunch of data.
    - justinclift 2y ago
      Good idea. Are you up for uploading it and the other models? There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of them, so it probably do-able in a few hours. Or maybe even faster if scripted?
calrain 2y ago
What is the risk of releasing the files, is it about to expose that the Rodin Museum has fakes?
exabrial 2y ago
> defend the public’s right to access all French national museums’ 3D scans of their collection 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.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  I don't think public funding necessarily means that the output should be publicly available. The benefits and risks should be evaluated, as they were in this case. The results of public funding of weapons programmes and surveillance satellites are understandably concealed, this museum situation is analogous despite the risks being significantly less consequential.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    The law has a few exceptions, like "state secrets". This case doesn't seem to fit any of them.
  - exabrial 2y ago
    Oh for sure. We’re talking art here though
loup-vaillant 2y ago
So, we have one of those uncommon cases where wealth (here in the form access to culture) actually can trickle down, and our government (among other parties) is actively preventing it. Though that’s not surprising from neo-liberal government who thinks pretty much everything should be privatised. They are after all quite explicitly about favouring the rich, and cutting off mass access to those bits of culture is but a small part of their plan to maintain and expand inequality.
lgvld 2y ago
Reminds me of The Digital Michelangelo Project lead by Marc Levoy at Stanford: https://accademia.stanford.edu/mich/ https://accademia.stanford.edu/mich/
- CosmoWenman 2y ago
  I have also made inquiries into the illiberal terms of access and use for the Stanford David/Michelangelo scans. The situation there—partly due to the influence of Italian cultural authorities, partly due to the indifference of every other institution involved, including Stanford and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation—is just as dumb and frustrating as in France. Those incredibly valuable, important scans are effectively orphaned and likely will remain so until someone who has the complete collection puts it on Pirate Bay.
CosmoWenman 2y ago
Mon article en français : https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/scans-3d-secrets-devant-le-conseil https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/scans-3d-secrets-devant-l... Merci de le partager avec toute personne susceptible d'être intéressée par les Open Data.

776 points by abetusk 2y ago

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558805 (Same person, same topic, different materials; this is the article about the bust of Nefertiti linked in the piece.)

lovegrenoble 2y ago
also very interesting

lovegrenoble 2y ago

Bon courage. I hope you get these hypocrites through. Do you have a foundation to raise money for lawyers?

kranke155 2y ago

"In response to the museum’s nonsensical technological claims, we submitted expert testimony from Professor Michael Kazhdan, full professor of computer graphics in the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and co-developer of the Poisson Surface Reconstruction algorithm, which is used worldwide in 3D scan data analysis. Professor Kazhdan explained to the court that documents in plaintext format are fundamentally well suited for preserving scan data, and that such documents are easily exploitable by experts and amateurs alike." Yes. Yes. That must've felt satisfying. "In response to Musee Rodin's nonsense, we present here the inventor of the basic techniques of 3D scanning, Dr. Kazhdan, from John Hopkins..."

deleted 2y ago
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Ringz 2y ago
Reminds me of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall scene „If Life Were Only Like This“: https://youtu.be/vTSmbMm7MDg https://youtu.be/vTSmbMm7MDg
- kranke155 2y ago
  It's pretty much that!
zelos 2y ago
"Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here...

praptak 2y ago

I am okay with public information being free to use commercially, with a huge disclaimer though. Wherever copyright is applicable, the public should retain it, that's what public domain is for. Any derived works, commercial or otherwise should also be in the public domain. If you fight for "public access" so that you can make your own stuff locked behind a copyright, then you are the hypocrite here.

geokon 2y ago
an interesting example where this has been problematic is OpenStreetMap. They can't ingest a lot of government data b/c their project requires a relicense with their attribution-requirement (where all users are forced to have an ugly OSM bumper sticker on their maps)
- pastage 2y ago
  FWIW attribution does not have to be big nor on the map, it is just less work to use the default than putting it elsewhere.
- stereo 2y ago
  What you call an ugly bumper sticker is credit where it is due, but also an important recruitment mechanism for new mappers, which improves the map. The /copyright page is our biggest landing page on the website, even above the base / page. Attribution is also a requirement of many proprietary map providers.
  - geokon 2y ago
    yes, I've misclicked the hidden link many times as well The credit is due to the volunteers or governments that created the data, and not the project that collates it (their names are not displayed). The logic behind wikipedia doesn't translate to OSM b/c OSM is providing data to be reused If this requirement wasn't there in the first place then OSM maps would have been the default go-to map and a household name like wikipedia. You wouldn't need to force an ad in every map to self-promote. > Attribution is also a requirement of many proprietary map providers the project had the opportunity to do something truly different and unique and chose not to... what a missed opportunity.

Jyaif 2y ago

> in private, RMN admits it won’t release its scans because it wants to protect its gift shops’ sales revenue from competition from the public making their own replicas. Sounds like a pretty good reason

frereubu 2y ago
Understandable perhaps, "good" enough to completely ignore copyright law, no.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  What copyright law? If I possess an out-of-copyright document, nothing requires me to make a copy for you when you ask me. They're ignoring the French freedom-of-information law; copyright law doesn't even touch the issue.
  - frereubu 2y ago
    My point, perhaps badly made, was that copyright law has expired, therefore it should be in the public domain.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Being in the public domain doesn't mean someone has to give you a copy.
      - kelseyfrog 2y ago
        No, that's why the author is using freedom of information laws to accomplish his goals. If you are a government institution - and these museums are - in a country with freedom of information laws, then it follows that you can be compelled to comply with them by the courts.
tupshin 2y ago
The article is long, but from TFA 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...

mmooss 2y ago

Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. The public can freely access hundreds of scans of classical sculpture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and visitors to the Smithsonian’s website can view, navigate, and freely download thousands of high-quality scans of artifacts ranging from dinosaur fossils to the Apollo 11 space capsule. Has anyone used these in games? They would be great easter eggs and they have artistry and design that is far beyond almost anything DIY.

BlueTemplar 2y ago
Potentially cooler than The Teapot, though there are also other considerations I guess...
diggan 2y ago
> Has anyone used these in games? 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://i.imgur.com/rtpiwjZ.png | https://github.com/BritishMuseumDH/rosettaStone/blob/master/models/stone.stl 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.
- 2y ago

glimshe 2y ago

What I feel about this is similar to what I feel about government-sponsored research institutes and universities not releasing their research to the public... If you get money from the government, society is paying for your work so it's entitled to it. Oh, you want to keep the data for yourself? DON'T ask or accept money from us the people.

deleted 2y ago
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jimmySixDOF 2y ago

There was an interesting project from the Natural History Museum using a syncatron particle accelerator to 3d scan some part their the famous 300 year old insect collection and make it openly available but that announcement was 2021 and I can't seem to find the results let alone see if they were released to the public. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/july/high-resolution-3d-scanning-understand-insect-evolution.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/july/high-resolutio...

foobar1962 2y ago
Maybe the delay has been caused by bugs.

Symbiote 2y ago

> The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.) I was initially sympathetic to the museum, as it's common for public funding to be tight, and revenue from the gift shop or commercial licencing of their objects can fill the gap. I don't know about France, but I expect the ministry has been heavily pushing public museums to increase their income in this way. However, that doesn't justify the deception described by the article.

BlueTemplar 2y ago
In the previous story over the Nefertiti bust, the German museum tried to use this gift shop defense, but then when pressed, you could see that they made almost no money from it.
mytailorisrich 2y ago
This the law of unintended consequences in action. I suspect that neither the government nor museums thought there was any legal obligations to make 3D scans public and I'd wager that the legislator did not have that in mind when they drafted the freedom of information laws. But then, suddenly (as per linked article): "The Commission on Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) ... had never before considered any dispute about 3D scans. It affirmed my request that musée Rodin communicate copies of its scans to me, determining for the first time that public agencies’ 3D scans are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public." A decision which has been going up the chain of courts since and is apparently close to the possibly dramatic climax. Indeed, the commercial argument is therefore irrelevant to this and the museum was clutching at straws there, really...
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Good laws try to be future-proof. Transparency of government is a big deal in liberal democracies. It's incongruous for a museum to resist something like this, when exhibiting artifacts to the public is one of the main reasons for their very existence.

niemandhier 2y ago

Data *should* be free, but in an age where predatory corps crawl the web to train models they hide behind paywalls, having control over your data means being able to explicitly give them to those that serve the common good. I used to be sympathetic to causes such as this, but in the advent of the plunder of our digital cultural heritage I have become skeptical. Why should proprietary AI get data payed for by the french tax payer?

adrianN 2y ago
States do a lot of things with taxes that benefit commercial interests. Why should this data be an exception?
kranke155 2y ago
That's the thing, this data is in public domain, since Rodin died a long long time ago.
rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
Just regulate AI, don’t mess with freedom because some abuse it.

Abhitaneja89 2y ago

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Abhitaneja89 2y ago

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myrmidon 2y ago

This is utterly puzzling to me. 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.

gyomu 2y ago
> pure stubbornness or some weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side 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-colere-qui-monte-portrait-d-un-systeme-en-crise_6225525_3232.html https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/04/02/justice-la-c...
newaccount74 2y ago
> weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side That's exactly it. I work on a website that makes ancient artefacts accessible. A lot of them are in museums. You wouldn't believe how many museums: - don't want to show you their archive - don't want to let you take pictures - want you to share only low res pictures - want you to get permission before you can "publish" their artefacts, etc. It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them. It's ridiculous. Fortunately, the people working on the website are relentless, and manage to eventually get collection after collection photographed and added mostly by being patient. For some collections it took 20 years before they got access -- but since everyone uses their website, and everyone apart from the local museum director wants the stuff to be in there, eventually they get access to most things. (Museums in Italy are the worst, allegedly. They really think they own antiquity.)

iterance 2y ago

I suspect the true rationale may be more deeply based on art history than either the museum or this article are letting on. To understand why, I think it's important to reckon with what happened to "art" as an institution when the processes of reproduction became cheap and readily available during the 1900s. I can only sketch and I won't fully do it justice. Before the 1900s, some methods of mechanical reproduction did exist. These methods could be used to mechanically reproduce the written word and very specific forms of visual media. But one factor governed the creation of reproducible works: the work had to be made in a format that permitted reproduction. Put another way, the author of a work must have designed their work for reproduction, implicitly or explicitly consenting to it. For example, a Japanese wood block carver chooses to make a wood block rather than draw directly on the page; this deliberate choice creates the means of mechanical reproduction. Even when this is done, the choice to do so often comes at prohibitive cost, and while the cost of reproduction is reduced, it remains nontrivial. But for the rest of art and artists, exclusivity was not just implied, it was an expected standard. There is only one Mona Lisa. It was made in so-and-so year by so-and-so. Around this grew a nearly occult tradition of reverence for the individual, as expressed through their work - their true work, the one in front of you, unique and inviolable. Through the 1900s artists were reckoning with the creation of film, and later, digital media. I won't rehash all these arguments. Suffice it to say that one main challenge was to the ethos of art itself. If the work is infinitely reproducible, then where has the artist gone? Today, anyone who wants to see the Mona Lisa has already done so. The original is a mere novelty, except to certain very rare specialists. This has only grown more true with digital media, as the ease of reproduction and fidelity have both increased dramatically. Among a certain type of art culture enthusiast, or maybe dogmatist, there remains a belief that art has lost something material as a result of its reproducibility. And it is undeniably a reasonable belief that if people are provided the requisite data, they will, eventually, reproduce the artwork to a satisfactory degree. To many of these people, call them any jeers you want, sculpture remains one of the last bastions where the occult value surrounding the artist, who made the work, has not been diminished, because no one has yet figured out how to mechanically reproduce a sculpture to a high degree of fidelity. Certain museums hold this as a guiding principle, because it is their interpretation of what "art" is supposed to culturally mean. A 3D scan of a sculpture destroys that final bastion of sanctity against the oncoming tide of reproducible devaluation. Now, I don't believe this argument is a good one. Frankly I think it's a bit Pollyanna, but I have to acknowledge I set it up so I could be strawmanning it a bit. But the reason we're not likely to hear it here is because, despite (what I suspect to be) its central importance to the Rodin, it is not, at its core, a legitimate legal argument.

sharpshadow 2y ago

Great read and an important battle for an open society. It strongly reminds me of universities and their model to sell papers to the public after the public already paid for their creation. Hopefully this ruling will somehow help in that regard to open up publicly funded work.

toolslive 2y ago

> ... are in fact administrative documents and by law must be made available to the public. They can still utterly frustrate you in the way they do this. They could fe print them out layer by layer and only show these in a specific "viewing room". I have seen my government (Belgium) use this strategy when it comes to architectural plans. In essence, it's public (you can access them) but it's also rather useless.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Do they offer an explanation as to why it’s set up that way? It seems too comically slow and inconvenient.
- toolslive 2y ago
  I guess they want to limit your time with them. If you could study them whenever you want with whatever tools you have, you can easily find conflicts between the plans and the building regulations. This would allow you to block the planned construction works. Even with the current protocol people find ways to block "progress". For example, the Oosterweel Link [0], which has been postponed multiple times. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Are exceptions to buildings regulations not typically documented somewhere in Belgium?
BobaFloutist 2y ago
'“But the plans were on display…” “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.” '

rendall 2y ago

> ...I approached musée Rodin with a strategy to illicit a full airing... Minor typo: if the author or anyone who knows him is reading this, the word wanted there probably is elicit.

dTal 2y ago
That jumped out to me as well, particularly given the otherwise high quality of the writing. It's an example of what I perceive as a more general phenomenon - spelling errors, particularly confusion of uncommon homonyms[note], appear to have increased in frequency. I previously attributed it to the internet simply lowering the bar for "publishing" to the less educated, and the greater proportion of text that makes it to our eyeballs without the intercession of an editor - but seeing such a glaring mistake in a text clearly written by someone with otherwise very good command of the language makes me wonder if there are other factors, perhaps the rise of verbal media such as audiobooks, podcasts, and YouTube channels. [note: I see "fazed" spelled as "phased" more often than I see it spelled correctly now. I suspect its proper spelling will eventually die out.]
- hotspot_one 2y ago
  or speech-to-text systems. The person might not be typing the text.
- rendall 2y ago
  It has taken me a long time to let go of "to beg the question" as exclusively meaning "to employ circular reasoning" and not cringe when I see it used to mean "to raise the question". What gave me calm to accept such changes is understanding that the language we use today is a result of such changes. Awful once meant full of awe and now means very bad or unpleasant. Nice no longer means foolish and now means pleasant. Girl referred to a young person of either gender and now specifically means a female child. Silly once meant happy or fortunate and now means foolish or absurd. Meat once referred to food of all kinds, not just animal flesh. I imagine there were people who experienced these changes with some despair. But everything's okay. English is still expressive and meaningful. The sky has not fallen. The center holds.

JofArnold 2y ago

I love this and applaud it. 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.

AyyEye 2y ago
Photogrammetry is well established and you can do that with any camera and a few hours of cpu time.
- mapt 2y ago
  Photogrammetry is great with textured, consistently lit, opaque objects. Blank white plaster, less so. You really want some kind of microtexture to grab on to for it to be anywhere close to a structured light scanner. That may mean you want a macro lens and a thousand exposures because you're grabbing on to microscopic surface roughness or dust. Not necessarily easy to do surreptitiously.
  - AyyEye 2y ago
    Yes they are different things and photogrammetry isn't a replacement for a "real" 3d scanner. But this is about museums which largely aren't unlit plain white surfaces. Getting models of museum objects is generally doable by anyone without thousands in specialised equipment. Taking a video or pictures is a lot less weird than pulling out any scanner.
    - dr_kiszonka 2y ago
      Do you have any software recommendations? I tried a few photogrammetry apps to capture small items (e.g., keycaps) and bigger ones (e.g., my face) but the results were never good enough. Ideally, I would like to open such models in Fusion, make a few edits, and 3D print them.

gwbas1c 2y ago

I've been to an art museum with a large collection of ancient Greek and Egyptian statues. A lot of the statues are damaged, or were painted and the paint has long since worn off. I'd love to walk through a VR recreation of what they believe the statues looked like when they were new. It balances the need for preservation of what remains, and the need to preserve the subjective interpretation of what the art was meant to be.

TheAceOfHearts 2y ago

I love the idea of preserving history through 3D scans. When I learned about Gobekli Tepe a few years ago it caught my heart, and since then I've been wishing that someone would produce a detailed 3D scan of the site. Does anyone know if there's any company, group, or non-profits trying to make this happen for key historical landmarks? Most people are unlikely to be able to visit such locations, and they probably can't handle that many visitors, so making a digital version seems like a great compromise.

chime 2y ago
Not a non-profit but Ubisoft has been doing significant 3D scanning and sharing (unsure under what license) for their Assassins Creed franchise: https://mocapsolutions.com/blogs/news/assassin-s-creed-unity-redeems-itself-with-3d-digital-scans-of-notre-dame-de-paris https://mocapsolutions.com/blogs/news/assassin-s-creed-unity... 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.

rpigab 2y ago

I am a French taxpayer. 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.

RansomStark 2y ago
> It's homeopathy for concrete 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-ml-18067#attr= https://www.lehm-laden.de/en_GB/shop/pneumatit-pneumatit-50-...
- rpigab 2y ago
  Oh how I wish I was joking. 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.
- jjcm 2y ago
  There's even more: > 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 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.

t43562 2y ago

There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it. When I see some of the virtual reconstructions of Ancient Rome or Pompeii, I wonder if the real thing will be of less interest than the reconstituted, repaired one. I think this is normal - there are now billions of people in the world and only so much "great art". I was in a huge crowd looking at the Mona Lisa. There was nothing magical about the experience. I'd rather have my own copy or put my VR glasses on and enjoy it in, say, the house where it was first displayed. I can see museums fearing the loss of visitors or at least fearing that someone else will make billions out of virtualising it and they won't. I mean, search engines make billions out of the knowledge other people built over centuries. AI takes open source information and code and makes billions selling the embodied knowledge that was given away for free. It's not as if corporations aren't happy to rape the commons and call themselves heroes for doing it. This isn't a good reason for the museum's attitude but I don't look to the future free exploitation of public information with unalloyed optimism.

rootusrootus 2y ago
> There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it. For certain things, I could see that. But for many things I go see, it's being there that is part of the point. Knowing that I'm seeing or touching the actual thing the artist saw and touched, or standing in a place where the builders worked build it, etc. Seeing a perfect representation misses that.
- SapporoChris 2y ago
  It probably depends a lot on personality. For myself, I obsessively studied space exploration history as a child. When I was much older, I toured National Air and Space Museum in District of Columbia and found it terribly boring, no new knowledge, nothing I hadn't read about before.
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    I can see your point of view. It definitely is going to depend on what you are going for. I've never gone to a museum for knowledge. I enjoyed the Smithsonian (though, aside from a few specific artifacts, I really prefer Udvar-Hazy to the museum on the mall) solely because of the feeling I got being in the presence of the actual machines that I've learned so much about. Reading about Glamorous Glennis or the Enola Gay is one thing, but to stand in front of it and think "that right there is the actual plane Chuck Yeager flew past mach 1" is 100% of why I go to the museum.

dagenleg 2y ago

Why exactly is non-commercial open access problematic? I think the author is going overboard by framing this as some kind of righteous crusade for the public access. After all, he is interested in making profit from this. Sure, public funding paid for it, so then why should the profits be privatized?

kardos 2y ago
There is no privatization here (moving the scans from public domain to private), the author is seeking the opposite, shifting the scans to the public unencumbered.
- dagenleg 2y ago
  Yes, to be commercialized and privatized by the author. Somehow all of the "open access projects" on the authors website seem to be concerned with releasing 3D models scanned by others, and not you know, his own projects. I don't see any commitments to publish derived work and such. I know that the story of an independent artist fighting a big bureaucratic public institutions is something that would get a lot of sympathy here, but this really isn't that much of a "David and Goliath" kind of tale. French heritage and research entities are underfunded and understaffed, they don't have competent lawyers, or indeed funding to afford those, as we can clearly see from this case. One litigation-happy American can run circles around them and profit from it too. If as soon as the heritage work gets 3D scanned with French public funds, it will immediately get scooped and monetized by private sector, wouldn't the ultimate outcome be that less objects get scanned? Why would the museums even bother fighting for the digitization grant funds?
  - kardos 2y ago
    > Yes, to be commercialized and privatized by the author. 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
    - 2y ago

djoldman 2y ago

> The court noted that musée Rodin had obviously created its 3D scans in the context of its public service mission .... the judges specifically reasoned against musée Rodin’s trade secrecy claim by citing its 3D digitization funding applications to the Ministry of Culture, in which the museum stipulated its commitment to publishing its scans. The museum had attempted to hide these funding applications from us and the court, telling the court they did not exist. However, in the course of the trial we obtained those applications by forcing a parallel documents request directly to the Ministry of Culture — which the museum complained to the court was a "crude maneuver" — exposing the museum’s deception and badly wounding the defense on this critical issue. Wow. If this went down as depicted, I'd be pretty disgusted with the museum if I was a citizen there.

lucasverra 2y ago

at the end of the article there is emails addresses of the actors in this. 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

dmitrygr 2y ago

Given that the museum has ignored all court orders and deadlines and faced no repercussions, what exactly do they expect will happen when the Supreme Court too rules against the museum? Until these court rulings have teeth, it just makes a fun article to read. A short jail term for the person who heads the museum might motivate them to act better

t_luke 2y ago

The British art journal has run a long campaign to establish that (a) museum photographs of out of copyright works cannot be copyrighted and (b) the schemes to sell such reproductions don’t even break even financially

bell-cot 2y ago

Ah, France. Where the gov't can decide that you are dead, and mere reality is not a valid counter-argument: https://apnews.com/article/woman-declared-dead-2017-is-alive-2256556e1c682d8ca561cc14b58b0228 https://apnews.com/article/woman-declared-dead-2017-is-alive...

rendall 2y ago

This is an astonishing account. I should no longer be amazed when governmental, or quasi-governmental, bodies abuse their authority in defiance of the law or reason, but it's absolutely baffling. Peripheral, but related: one of my favorite genre of YouTube video is that of people who quietly assert their civil rights to, e.g., stand in front of City Hall with a cardboard sign, or record video inside City Hall or a public library or other public building, or record anything at all on video from a public sidewalk, or criticize the mayor at a town meeting, all completely legal and protected activity in the USA. Astonishing, the number of times a civil servant or police officer will attempt to run these people off under threat of arrest, exposing themselves and their town to a federal lawsuit. Invariably, without an ounce of self reflection, they frame these people as troublemakers, as no doubt does the Rodin Museum to Cosmo Wenman, even as the courts thump them.

krick 2y ago

This is kinda amazing that one has fight for it. I would like to think any museum should be immensely grateful to anyone willing to put in his time to either do the scanning himself or at least to provide an open platform to distribute the scans. Honestly, I am less sympathetic about this particular case (I mean, who cares about accurate representations of Rodin's sculptures anyway?), but making an open catalog of all digital copies of all ancient stuff found this far really should be #1 priority for history as a research discipline at this point, IMO. It is absurd that anyone would actively prevent that. Yet, at some sites you aren't even allowed to take a photo (yes, w/o a flash), even if it is accessible. Most important sites and archives, obviously, aren't accessible to normal people at all.

justinclift 2y ago

> Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. Attempting that just now from the linked page: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-rosetta-stone-1e03509704a3490e99a173e53b93e282 https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-rosetta-stone-1e03509704... Note that Sketchfab is a 3rd party crowd (not the British Museum), and trying to download that model requires signing up for a Sketchfab account. So while it's kind of "public access", that's only while Sketchfab is still around and still requires giving this random place your details. It's better than nothing, but not exactly fantastic for a public institution to be doing.

sadeshmukh 2y ago
At least you can download it. They can't undownload it once you have it, and people can distribute from what they have.
- justinclift 2y ago
  Yeah, thus my "better than nothing" wording. :) Interestingly, also from the article: I’m much less interested in half measures, whereby the public might be granted access to scans only for, say, educational purposes, but be improperly prohibited from using them commercially. Those kinds of compromises undermine the public’s right to reuse public domain works and can lead to people hesitating to use them in any way because they are unsure of their rights and fear unknown punishments. Whereas the licence on that Rosetta Stone scan by the British Museum is indeed "non commercial" only: License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlikeCC
- autoexec 2y ago
  It'd be nice if they got uploaded to archive.org or somewhere else where the public can get it without handing over a bunch of data.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Good idea. Are you up for uploading it and the other models? There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of them, so it probably do-able in a few hours. Or maybe even faster if scripted?

calrain 2y ago

What is the risk of releasing the files, is it about to expose that the Rodin Museum has fakes?

exabrial 2y ago

> defend the public’s right to access all French national museums’ 3D scans of their collection 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.

Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
I don't think public funding necessarily means that the output should be publicly available. The benefits and risks should be evaluated, as they were in this case. The results of public funding of weapons programmes and surveillance satellites are understandably concealed, this museum situation is analogous despite the risks being significantly less consequential.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  The law has a few exceptions, like "state secrets". This case doesn't seem to fit any of them.
- exabrial 2y ago
  Oh for sure. We’re talking art here though

loup-vaillant 2y ago

So, we have one of those uncommon cases where wealth (here in the form access to culture) actually can trickle down, and our government (among other parties) is actively preventing it. Though that’s not surprising from neo-liberal government who thinks pretty much everything should be privatised. They are after all quite explicitly about favouring the rich, and cutting off mass access to those bits of culture is but a small part of their plan to maintain and expand inequality.

lgvld 2y ago

Reminds me of The Digital Michelangelo Project lead by Marc Levoy at Stanford: https://accademia.stanford.edu/mich/ https://accademia.stanford.edu/mich/

CosmoWenman 2y ago
I have also made inquiries into the illiberal terms of access and use for the Stanford David/Michelangelo scans. The situation there—partly due to the influence of Italian cultural authorities, partly due to the indifference of every other institution involved, including Stanford and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation—is just as dumb and frustrating as in France. Those incredibly valuable, important scans are effectively orphaned and likely will remain so until someone who has the complete collection puts it on Pirate Bay.

CosmoWenman 2y ago

Mon article en français : https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/scans-3d-secrets-devant-le-conseil https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/scans-3d-secrets-devant-l... Merci de le partager avec toute personne susceptible d'être intéressée par les Open Data.