> What scares the Rodin Museum is that they are still selling reproductions.

No, what scares them is the idea that someone else might view their artwork without visiting their museum. Revenue from the gift shop doesn't enter into it at all.

I have a friend in museum management and I socialize with their museum friends.

A frequent topic of discussion is how hard it can be to get things on display. Many people in museum related roles view their job first as protecting and preserving the displays at all costs, with presenting them to the public as an unfortunate necessity that they’re forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who don’t want the best or most valuable works to be put on display or loan because that risks damaging them.

I would have thought that high resolution copies and archives of art would be a dream come true for these people, but from what I’ve observed many of them oppose that as well. They feel it provides an inauthentic or incomplete sense of their valued works, while also diminishing their profession of preserving these items. When you view yourself as the gatekeeper for a special, irreplaceable treasure, anything that produces a facsimile of that treasure is an abomination that must be resisted.

Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.

What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.

I ask myself that with every FOIA request. If I had a dollar for every internal email I obtained saying that the public body intended to ignore the FOIA and make me sue for access, I would certainly be able to buy a sandwich.

Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.

There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.

I often have the experience of going to a museum, seeing a painting I like, and then not being able to find any image of it online - let alone a highres scan. In my casual searches I've found museums generally don't share high resolution scans of their collections. Try to find high resolution images of famous, but not super famous paintings. It's often virtually impossible.

I remember in college my art history professor had a personal digital collection of high quality scans that he'd procure somehow that were impossible to find online. The data seems to be highly guarded, I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise

So my impression is that the Rodin Museum is not really the exception here

Because you could use the point clouds to make great reproductions. iPhones could make make these point clouds soon anyway.

Of course, reproductions are how basically how all of his statues we see today were made anyway, using and scaling up the clay sculptures. The musee rodin still makes authorized “original” reproductions, up to 12 can be called original. These are authorized by the musee rodin, and account for 30-45 percent of their annual budget.

So a perfect point cloud could be used to make your own molds, and from their your own bronze statues. I wouldn’t call it “counterfeit” because that’s basically how they were done even back in the day, and why there are many “authentic/original/authorised” Thinkers/etc across the world.

Probably at some point walking around with an iPhone will be good enough to make a near indistinguishable point cloud, so the result of this legal process could be kinda moot unless they stop folks from using iPhones near the statues all over the world.

https://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/museum/institution/self-fundin...

After reading the article, my interpretation isn't that they put an enormous legal effort into combating the release of the scans, it's that they put very little work into fighting against the OP, made a lot of bad arguments and knew from the start they would get away with it.

It comes off a little bit like they made a lazy decision at the outset, didn't want to reverse course to save face and knew they didn't need to back it up with anything....

From my perspective, having high resolution scans or even 3D scans could undermine the role of the museums. Their role is to provide the best environment to view, to experience and to appreciate the works of the artists. A casual viewing at home, from a computer cannot provide that optimal experience and almost certainly will reduce the wish to visit the museum in person. Much like a recording of a concert or an opera cannot replace a in-person experience but (unfortunately?) is the default way for pop music. Much of that experience is how we mentally, emotionally and physically prepared ourselves for the experience.

Museums want to prevent that and also ensure their own existence.

PS: in this specific case, the museum has to worry about counterfeit copies of Rodin works as well. But I don’t want to succulents on that as I don’t know the details.

Because they are snobby gatekeepers who think making art more accessible would dilute their value. These sorts are very common in the art and academia world.

Maybe it’s about the precedent and the government didn’t want to have to publish raw data on everything they have so they made sure to win this one?

Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…

This case was about trying to obtain the museum’s own scans under FOI, it’s nothing to do with releasing your own scans.

I’m open to ideas but I don’t see how they could screw you if they’re your own scans. They can’t copyright stolen artifacts from other countries, so they can’t get you on copyright. It’s not their files, so they can’t get you on piracy.

Do it.

What is a spatial index

By the time you get C&D’d it would be far too late.

I’d spend a while thinking about it but I know what my immediate impulse would be.

Even without the original high quality scans, surely some talented artists could make a passable facsimile which is suitable to sell in a knick-knack gift shop.

They're described as "Paris-based", not necessarily French.

Legal systems typically use non-monotonic logic. Most formal logic systems, particularly in mathematical fields, use monotonic logic. Monotonic logic isn't well suited for the law or most other areas of human activity.

If you want an entire legal system formally defined in logic, you're going to have to do a ton of novel work in expanding the understanding of and application of non-monotonic logic because there isn't much scholarship compared to monotonic logic systems.

That said, France is one of the only countries that has tried anything like this. Their tax system is required to be defined and expressed algorithmically, and they even built a programming language and compiler tool chain to do this. I think it uses monotonic logic, though, and I don't think anybody has seriously suggested the French tax code is something to be copied, neither as a tax code nor an approach to legal codification more generally.

> But the Rodin Museum and the Ministry of Culture simply ignored the court’s order. To be clear, they did not appeal it, they ignored it.

No formulation of the law will solve this. The problem is clearly not that the law was unclear. Either the people with real power do what's right, or they don't.

> People always get upset when I propose mathematical formalization of law and using e.g. metamath verifier as a judge.

I don’t get upset. I just don’t know what that means. What would that look like in practice?

Lets see some simple example. 18 U.S. Code § 912: “Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

How would you write that in mathematical formalization?

And then how would you make a metamath verifier judge if Robert J. Rippee committed it on January 1, 1991? I’m sure you can google the case(United States v. Rippee, 961 F.2d 677), but a short summary: “On January 1, 1991, officers from the National City, Illinois, Police Department stopped Rippee for making an illegal U-turn. The officers let Rippee go without a ticket, however, when he told them he was a United States Marshal on his way to break up a fight at Fannies' Night Club in Brooklyn, Illinois. […] Rippee stipulated that he was not and had never been a United States Marshal.“

How would something like that look like under your proposed system?

Formalisation can't save you from determining what is and isn't a document. The judges main task is formalising reality and lawd, the rest of the inference is typically easy.

Are laws expected to be completely self and cross consistent?

I wanted programmatic law in the past and then after thinking and talking a bit, concluded that self and cross consistency in the law is not considered necessary.

Nobody gets upset, they just think you’re silly. Law simplification is just a classic time waste discussion. But I’ll waste 30 seconds on it for you.

Consider a simple crime, murder. Let’s simplify it to “if you kill someone, that’s murder and you get life”

But then what if I’m being stabbed by the person I kill?

Okay so self defence.

But then what if I say it’s self defence but factually that’s incorrect, but I genuinely believed it was self defence?

What if I’m a soldier and I’m shooting an enemy?

What if I shoot them because they’re raping my child?

What if I’m shooting them because they raped my child ten years ago and I’ve been plotting my revenge ever since?

What if someone said they’ll shoot me if I didn’t shoot them?

What if I was in psychosis and thought they were going to kill me?

What if I thought they were a deer and shot them by mistake while hunting?

It turns out we have all these laws in this particular way because of thousands of years of work dealing with all of these issues.

I'm not upset, but what you're proposing is just stupid. If you think that mathematical formalization is a desirable quality then you clearly don't understand the purpose of having a legal system in the first place.

The museum sets out its position in the letter from the director, linked in the article. The court record also mentioned isn’t public. So it seems that if the museum has a different argument to make than in the letter, they’re not taking the opportunity to do publicly. Draw from that what you will!

This is an absolute par-for-the-course FOIA case anywhere in the world.

There's a saying "You can't beat city hall!" If you sue a public body then it'll be a public prosecutor defending the case. They probably eat lunch with another public employee every day: the judge on your case. Who are you, a dirty prole, to attack the government?

In your first line, in trial courts where you create your record, you face the simplest judges with the least legal knowledge and experience who will quickly dismiss your case on a whim.

Only at the appellate level do you stand any remote chance of turning things in your favor, and only then if your case is absolutely indisputable. Don't expect any of the courts to look logically or fairly at your evidence, or to accept your testimony over that of the government.

Just look at chaps[0] here who made an absolutely concrete case for the release of a database schema under FOIA, and was represented by the smartest and highest respected law firm in the state, and still got smashed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chaps

[1] "Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas" https://mchap.io/